Endless Realities
by noenigma
Summary: An AU based on Continuum...trapped in a time-altered reality, Carter and Daniel struggle to accept their new lives even as they seek a way to right the timeline.
1. Prologue

Disclaimer: Purely for fan purposes; no copyright infringement intended.

 _Author's Note: This piece picks up a year after the death of Jack O'Neill in the original timeline and presumes that events unfolded pretty much like they were shown in the movie except it was Frank Cornwell leading the team that rescued Sam and Mitchell... SG-1 did not meet up with the Jack O'Neill of the altered timeline at all. There are a few other variations as well. Some because I didn't rewatch the movie often enough to catch where I made a change until it was too late and some just because that's how the story went._

The woman called Maggie Clark frowned at the box of generic Fruit Loops before tossing them resignedly into her cart. It would be more accurate to say the woman who the cashier after squinting at her printed receipt and glancing at her purchases that all too clearly spelled out she was shopping for only one would call Ms. Clark or, lacking even that much interest, ma'am frowned at the box of generic _Fruit Loops_. Because no one called her by name, hers or the one printed in bold, black letters on the driver's license they'd provided her.

Not even Daniel. Daniel 'Johnson' who'd at least been left a semblance of his identity because he hadn't died in _Technicolor_ on national news in a manner that made his name a household word for a day or two. When they spoke on the phone, he avoided calling her by either name, neatly sidestepping breaking their proscribed rules while refusing to call her by a name which wasn't hers.

And not Cam who'd managed to keep his name in its entirety because no one else in this timeline apparently had ever seen fit to lay claim to it. He didn't call, and when she forced herself to check in on him from time to time, he mumbled something unintelligible into the receiver that was something between Colonel, Sam, and Maggie. Maybe or maybe it was nothing at all. She really couldn't tell.

The relocation team had thought they were doing her a favor when they'd planted her in the midst of a city full of disinterested strangers. "The likelihood someone will recognize you and create an incident is substantially lower in the city," they'd stated authoritatively. But, they'd been wrong.

The cashiers who took the time to actually look at her instead of her purchases passing over their scanners would frown in a vague sort of unsettled recognition when she passed through their lines. Some of them would look behind her at the tabloids in the racks as though trying to place where they'd seen her face before. Librarians would smile over her stack of books and periodicals and murmur, "You look remarkably like..." and then they'd let the words trail off and shake their heads apologetically at their mistake.

Whenever she forced herself out of the apartment, someone was bound to do a double take at the sight of her. It was a never ending procession of mistaken identity-or not, depending on how you looked at it-here in the city where a million or so folks rubbed shoulders with another million or so strangers yesterday, today, and tomorrow and because of sheer numbers never grew accustomed to the faces that they passed.

They should have dropped her in small-town America where the people would grow used to her remarkable resemblance to a dead celebrity soon enough. After a time, they would have seen Maggie Clark when they looked at her and not Samantha Carter that astronaut who died when _the Endeavour_ crashed into the Atlantic.

And maybe, someone might have called her by name and found a way to break through the oppressive wall that cut her off from them. Maybe. If they'd been strong enough to reach through her lassitude, her indifference, her apathy. Her depression.

"Get to the Gate," he'd said and then he'd died. And nothing she'd been through in the past year, not the loss of everything she knew, not the loss of herself, her career, her purpose in life, nor the loss of the few people who had been left her had lessened that pain or numbed the utter hopelessness in which she'd lived-if you could call what she was doing living anyway-since then.

He was dead. And for all she knew the life she wasn't quite living was horribly wrong, she couldn't change it. Couldn't hope to backtrack through time and gain back her own life let alone his. As long as she lived, she'd continue to wake up in a world where he was dead and a world where the man he was-if he lived at all-was not the man he had been. And there was nothing she could do about it.

The woman, who would have been called Maggie Clark if anyone would have bothered to try to learn her name, bit her lip, ducked her head to avoid meeting the eyes of another stranger who thought they knew her from somewhere, and walked out of the store leaving behind her shopping cart with its paltry contents.

The box of _Fruit Loops_ lay where she'd tossed it haphazardly into the cart, a clue to a life torn from time and tossed just as haphazardly into this world. She wouldn't have eaten them anyway; she couldn't stand their garish colors or their sweet crunchiness. They were a connection to a man who might or might not exist somewhere in this world but who definitely no longer lived in the world she could never regain. He'd contentedly crunched his way through huge mouthfuls of them in a time forever lost. She'd thought for a moment looking at the bright package that she wanted the reminder of him, but she'd been wrong.

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"Hey," Daniel said when he'd answered the phone.

She'd clutched the phone tightly in her hand and found she had nothing to say. She hadn't called to talk. She'd called to hear his familiar voice. To know she wasn't alone in this world.

"You okay?" he asked quietly, gently after only silence had come from her end of the line.

"I...I think...I...I...feel...like disappearing, Daniel," she said in reply.

"What do you mean?" he asked alarmed. "You'd never make it."

"Not that," she said, "not running disappearing."

"Then what?"

"I feel like I'm disappearing...dissipating like fog. Like I'm being wiped from time. Dissolving into nothingness."

He sighed and she could hear it so clearly over the connection that she felt the warm puff of breath against her cheek. And she knew she should have called Cam instead. Cam who had managed somehow to find a purpose of sorts in this world and who wouldn't put up with her melancholy. Not Daniel who had in very obvious ways lost even more than she had.

But it was too late. For a moment, he didn't say anything, and then with finality and intense regret he said, "We wouldn't be so lucky."


	2. Shifting Realities

The move was good for her. Well worth the trouble it had taken convincing the government to allow her to relocate.

"We really do want you to be happy," one of her handlers had told her as she'd fought her way through the system. She hadn't bothered to answer. Happiness was not something she believed she'd ever experience again. It was, in fact, something that she had begun to wonder if she'd ever experienced at all. Perhaps the heartrending memory of happiness was just an illusion that she'd conjured up out of her misery.

"Why Minnesota?" they'd probed.

"No reason," she'd said with a shrug.

"Do you-did you know someone there?"

"No," she'd said. If they couldn't bother to clarify which timeline they were asking about they couldn't blame her for not being more specific herself. They should have known as well as she did that answers which would have been lies in her own world were the absolute truth as she knew it in this one.

"Have you ever been there?"

"No," she'd answered.

"Then, why Minnesota?" they'd demanded again.

"Maybe I want to dance with the bear. You know," she'd added with a weary sigh when they'd just looked at her with their puzzled faces, "the beer bear?" They'd pursed their lips and shaken their heads, and she'd shrugged her shoulders and apologetically said, "Wrong world." Which hadn't gone far in satisfying them even though it was the only completely truthful answer she'd given them the entire interview.

"It looks like the kind of place I could get lost in," she'd finally answered. Her voice must have conveyed the depth of her despair because that's when they'd wished her happiness as though they'd understood a little too well what she meant.

In time, she was duly installed into the small, northern town surrounded by rugged beauty and inhabited by fewer people than had lived in a five-block radius of her former apartment.

"Land of Sky-Blue Waters," he'd said enticingly as though the words alone could lure her in to dropping everything under the Mountain and joining him. But, she'd only smiled and shaken her head and if she had it to do over again she would have packed her bags and never looked back. Only, of course, even he hadn't made the trip that time. Other times though, when the Asgard hadn't seen fit to interfere with his vacation plans-she should have gone.

Why hadn't she? The rules and regulations? Her insecurities and uncertainties? Those about herself-her ability to succeed in a relationship after Jonas Hansen had callously shattered her confident belief that love and understanding were all that were needed to make a marriage work.

Or those about him? 'Too many years of black ops', the very words she'd used to explain to Daniel why she hadn't been surprised to find Hansen playing god, could and at times did apply to him. They'd left a shadowed hardness hidden beneath the smart mouth and soft, brown eyes. Had the fear one day the bitterness would win out over the boyishness kept her from joining him? That she wouldn't be able to hold the darkness at bay and would never survive waking up to his cutting sarcasm day after day? Or the fear it wasn't really her he wanted, that he'd find her only a poor substitute for Sarah, for Laira?

What was it that had kept her sheltered in the bowels of the Mountain frittering away precious moments and hours that she would now sell her soul to relive sitting by his side on his dock swatting mosquitoes and not catching a single fish?

Sheer stupidity anyway she looked at it. But there was no going back. And no real going forward either. Still, the move was good for her. The sky-blue waters of Minnesota, the crisp clean air, the woods, the people who nodded on the streets and smiled when she rang the bell pushing open the door to the small cafe or slightly dingy grocery store. They lured her out of her cabin in a way the sights and sounds and smells of the city never had.

Though she hadn't known it, she'd seen him the first day she'd arrived. She'd shut the door on the unopened boxes holding her few possessions and walked down to the lake. The sky-blue waters were fading into twilight, and the boats had been dark silhouettes against the darkening sky. The houseboat had been there, looming larger and lower in the water than the other vessels. And he'd stood with one leg on its railing and looked out over the lake. A dark shape she'd glanced at without recognition or sense of déjà vu.

She hadn't come looking for him. "There is no record of a Jack, Jon, or Jonathan O'Neill in the Air Force. Or any branch of the service, for that matter," they'd said. She'd had no reason to not believe them and every reason to avoid finding Jack O'Neill, not of the U.S. Air Force, if he existed in this timeline because he wouldn't be her Jack. He'd be a stranger with the face and voice and hands of the man she loved, but he wouldn't be him. So, she hadn't come looking for him. Hadn't even chosen on her way up from the city to drive pass the small town and lake where his cabin had stood in her timeline. Instead, she'd driven an extra hour to not have to see it and know he wasn't there.

She wondered later, if she had come looking would she have recognized him that day in the approaching nightfall? And the answer was no. He wasn't Jack, had never been Jack, and would never be Jack. The world he lived in was not the world of Jack O'Neill, and it would have shown in the way he stood at the railing that night.

He'd stood then, no doubt, like he always stood with a slight hunch to his shoulders as though withstanding a chilly, northern blast of wind. His spine had never been stiffened by drill sergeants and long hours of standing at attention. The height would have been right, the long arms and legs, though he was thicker-not fat or heavy, just thicker than Jack had ever been. His stillness might have at first glance approximated that of Jack on watch, but it would have been too...relaxed. The man on the boat wouldn't have stood with the weight of command on his shoulders, ever watchful, ever ready for an attack. He would have been safe in his world with the soothing sounds of gentle waves lapping against the side of his boat. She would never have given him a second look, even if she had come expecting to find him. Which she hadn't.

It was the boys she remembered and recognized later. Various sizes and shapes of boys and young men shifting around the boat, their laughing, boisterous voices carrying faintly to her on the shore. They'd seemed happy, and she'd stood on the shore and gazed out at the boat for a long time before turning back to her silent cabin with its yet to be unpacked boxes.

And it was the boys she met first. Two or three or more of them would run past her as she walked along the shore or swarm through the door of the store while she was there shopping. Those were the youngest boys-always racing here or there, jostling to be first at the candy rack or to a finish line only they could see. They spoke to her in passing: "Sorry," as they bumped her in their headlong dash back out of the store or "Whoops," as they skidded to a stop to pick back up whatever they'd knocked from her hands as they'd raced past.

She'd smile at their rapidly departing backs and shake her head along with everyone else they'd left in their wake.

"Those boys!" the clerk would say, but she'd be smiling too.

The middle boys were quieter, slower, and shyer. They tended to wander the town alone on secret missions all their own. They were very similar in size and looks so that it was only one day when she happened to catch them sitting together at the café counter that she realized there were two of them. All four of the younger boys had rushed in then to beg change for the Coke machine from their older brothers and she'd seen their resemblance to one another. But in their brown eyes, laughing faces, and lanky bodies she hadn't seen him. That came later.

David, the younger of the two middle boys, seemed to gravitate toward the same outreaching arm of the shore that drew her. It was not a particularly welcoming area. The shore was rocky making it unpleasant for barefooted frolicking on the beach. The wind blew harder there, quickly carrying any line cast from its rocky point back to shore and discouraging the average fisherman. There wasn't even any scrub brush to offer shade from the glaring sun or shelter from the rain when it came. All in all, it was uninviting stretch of shoreline which made it her favorite haunt those first days following her arrival in town.

Why the boy (all long arms and legs, having hit his growth spurt but still chasing the changes puberty would wreck on his little boy body) chose it was a mystery she didn't have the energy to concern herself with. But, she nodded back in a not unfriendly fashion when he nodded at her in passing, and from there, over the next few days, they progressed to smiles and 'Afternoon'. Never 'Morning' as she fought off the day as long as possible and never left the nothingness of her bed before 1330 or 1400. And never 'Evening' because he was much too young to be wandering the town and lake unsupervised that late in the day. Eleven, she thought, twelve at the most. And that was about all the thought she gave him.

David, on the other hand, gave her a great deal more thought. There was something mysterious and sad about her. At least that's how it seemed to him. But, then maybe he'd read too many books or watched too many shows, because when he finally gathered up his courage and struck up a conversation with her she seemed ordinary enough. Well, he guessed so anyway. He hadn't visited with that many women to really be able to say for sure.

That's when he began dragging his younger brothers out to meet her. The older were all too busy to bother and might anyway tell him to leave the poor woman be as she most probably wanted to be alone and it was almost certain that if she didn't it wasn't a pack of wild, little hooligans she'd want around her.

The boys were all to one degree or another quickly taken with her. And she seemed happy enough to find herself in their acquaintance. Or maybe she was just too nice and polite to tell them to go jump in the lake. Because though they'd soon told her near enough everything about themselves, their dad and the older brothers on the boat and the one married with three sons of his own in Oregon, their summer life on the houseboat, and their winter life on land with school and skating and hockey they never seemed to learn much more from her than her name.

"I'm David O'Neill," he'd said shyly as he held out his hand for her to shake that first day he'd gotten up the courage to talk to her. She'd known by then, hadn't she? Heard his rough voice calling to the boys across the water, his laugh, his whistle, even his singing. ("If you call that singing," he'd said in another life, scowling at himself in the monitor singing 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat'.)

She'd reached out her hand and taken that of a child who almost could have been her own. A slightly damp, somewhat sticky hand whose grip had been firm and sure. It was a hand capable of anchoring her to this life, a hand to keep her from dissolving into the mist that covered the lake when evening fell. She hadn't come looking for it any more than she'd come looking for the man on the boat, and she didn't recognize it for what it was any more than she'd recognized him.

"Maggie," she'd said, not because she wanted to make friends with this child but because it was the expected thing to say, "Maggie Clark. Nice to meet you." And it had been. The boys, in ones or twos or one large group, visited with her wherever she wandered through the afternoons. It didn't seem to occur to them she might enjoy a bit of peace and quiet though one day David had asked her quite solemnly if she thought they were a bother.

"No," she'd said and been surprised to find it was true. She liked their uncomplicated company. "Why?" she asked concerned she'd given them that impression and suddenly afraid they'd wander off and leave her to her own devices.

He shrugged and said, "My dad. He said, maybe we were. You know, maybe you didn't want us hanging around so much?"

"Oh." Their dad. A topic she avoided as much as possible. Though everything they told her of him only confirmed the truth she'd already understood. Regardless of the genetic material he shared with the man she knew, he was not her Jack O'Neill. Still, she shied away from even the mention of him.

It was an odd thing, knowing he had a counterpart in this world and wanting nothing more than to never meet him, never have to smile and say 'nice to meet you' to the stranger who was the man she loved-or had loved.

She would have thought she'd feel the opposite, a desperate need to see him alive and well whether he looked at her with the warmth of shared memories or the eyes of a stranger. Instead it left her with a choking dread. A dread that would have sent her packing if she had been at liberty to go where she wanted, do what she wished. But, she was a prisoner in this world and jumping through the hoops to move again...well, she could always hope he'd spend the summer on his boat and leave her alone.

"Oh," she said again not trusting herself to say anything else. After a moment, she'd forced herself to smile reassuringly at the boy and say, "He doesn't need to worry. Tell him...tell him it's a pleasure to have you around."

David had beamed at her words, and the next day reported his dad had given his permission for them to 'hang around if she really doesn't mind...but you better be sure you're not causing trouble!' And that could have sounded like any man, anywhere.

Ty, the youngest boy, was six (just turned, he'd proudly told her as though it had been a major accomplishment in his young life) and a live wire of movement and noise who one day to her surprise, and maybe his own, had wormed his way onto her lap, pulled her arms around his middle, clasped them there with his own hands, and melted into her embrace. After several minutes, he'd turned his face up to her and said, "Are you a mom?"

She might have been. If she'd played her hand differently she might have been a mom to a boy very much like him or any one of his brothers chasing crawdads and minnows in the shallow water of the lake. "No," she'd answered him quietly.

"Oh, I thought...I thought maybe this is what a mom feels like." They'd all as a group had very little to say about their mom and that had been more than fine with her. She hadn't wanted to know how he'd come to be living in a houseboat with a whole slew of sons, grown and not, and no mother in the picture. She'd half guessed there were divorce papers filed somewhere and the boys spent the winters in a house under their mother's care. Ty's wistful tone blew that guess out of the water.

"Well, I imagine it's very much the same," she'd said.

"Oh. It's nice."

"Yes, it is."

"She didn't leave us, you know," David had huffed from his place doodling in the soft sand at her feet. "She didn't!" he repeated harshly as though she'd argued with him. "It was snowing and the road was icy." And with that being the end all of an argument they hadn't been having, he rose and stalked off without dusting the sand from his long legs.

Meaning what exactly, she wondered? He'd been old enough to know when his mother had left, abandoning them to the storm and their father? Or he'd been too young to remember what had happened and someone-one of the older boys perhaps-had told him the story of his mother's death, explaining the accident away with icy roads? She blinked after him, pulled the little boy in her lap closer, kissed the top of his head, and refused to think any more about what was clearly none of her business.

In time, she was dutifully introduced to the older brothers. Josh, a year older than David though they shared the same clothes and David was the trailblazer. Travis, fifteen and bridging the gap between the three older brothers already grown men and the six younger boys all still clearly children. Most days he stayed on the boat with the men, but there were times when he ran on the shore with the children. Always shy around her, he was the one who called her Miss Clark or Ma'am though she'd 'Maggied' him a dozen times.

She met Matt and Danny, the grown brothers from the boat, only briefly. They'd politely inclined their capped heads in her direction and then hurried off about their business. She'd breathed a sigh of relief after them. The caps had shadowed their faces and she hadn't had to see him there.

That wasn't the case when Charlie arrived with his three sons in tow. She met his sons first, of course. If she hadn't by then known better she would have thought they were simply more of the brothers. They ran about the town and lake with the same abandon and spirit as their uncles. Their presence was not a problem.

Unfortunately, she met their father all too soon.

"Maggie, here's Charlie-Charlie, here's Maggie," David had introduced them in passing as he careened down the otherwise quiet street after his brothers and nephews in some wild game of chase.

Caught unawares, laughing over the flurry of boys racing by, she'd turned and came face to face with the unmistakable son of Jack O'Neill. She realized she'd expected him to be a grownup version of the Charlie she'd glimpsed in the corridors of a besieged hospital years before. He wasn't, and with half-grown sons how could she have expected him to be? He couldn't have been even a full ten years younger than she was herself. Tall, like his father, but broader, darker. Dark brown, laughing eyes that came from his father. Wavy, black hair that hadn't.

Jack's hand extended towards her; his voice, not yet roughened by age but still his, said, "Heard a lot about you...good to meet you finally." They'd stood in the street a moment. Two strangers who knew each other rather well through the boys' never ending chatter. She knew he lived in Oregon (you know, the place the wagon trains went if they didn't all get killed by the Indians first?), had a wife who worked in a bank (did you know that when you work at a bank you don't get to take the money home, even if you need it?), a dog (bigger than Grandpa's ol' dog by a long ways!), and drove 'the coolest' car.

He doubtlessly knew just as much about her as well. Or at least he must have felt he did. "It's the first summer I've come home since Mom died...five years now. I thought-she loved the boat, see? I thought it would be too hard without her, but...I should have come sooner. The boys hardly know each other now." Having spent the past two afternoons watching them shouting and laughing with their uncles, she thought that probably wasn't the problem he thought it was.

"And, Dad..." he let that observation trail off and that was more than fine with her. "So, what do you think of our little town?" he'd returned the conversation to small talk, and she'd soon found an exit line.

Two days later, the boys, all talking loudly and at once, informed her they were pushing off the next morning. "I can't understand all of you shouting at once," she'd told them with a smile on her face that had disappeared when David had explained at a rate and decibel she could comprehend, "The boat's finally all ready to go, and now that Charlie and everyone are here, we're leaving early in the morning!"

"Oh," she said weakly. "Where will you go?"

"Everywhere!" they told her with huge grins on their faces. "We're going everywhere. All the way up into Canada even!"

She thought she should have known. No wonder he'd been ok with his sons running around like street orphans. He'd been busy making preparations for the trip. She should have been relieved. The way she felt about seeing him, the more distance between them the better.

But, then it wasn't the thought of his absence that was upsetting her. (How could it be? She'd never even met him.) She looked at the excited faces of the boys surrounding her and fumbled with a reply, "How long...how long will you be gone? Or-will you even be coming back here this summer?"

"Oh, sure. We always come back here," they assured her.

"This is our homeport," Ty added.

"Won't be gone longer than a month," Charlie's oldest son told her, "Our mom won't let Dad keeps us here any longer than a month, and we've been gone almost a week already."

The other boys frowned at his words. "We might not get quite everywhere then," one of them said with disgust.

"Oh, well," David said philosophically, "if not this trip, the next!"

They'd run off then with a quick, 'See you, Maggie' to ensure they were stocked with enough bubble gum and jawbreakers to see them to everywhere and back. She'd swayed weakly watching them go and trying not to think what it meant that these boys from a world that shouldn't be could mean so much to her that the thought of a month without their laughing noisy presence filling her afternoons was devastating.

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"Trust me, if you lived in this timeline..." a General Landry they did not know had confidently started, and Cam had reluctantly finished, "...we'd want it to stay the way it is."

He'd shut them up all right, brought all their arguments to an end with that statement. Still, if it meant Jack was lying dead back there on that now empty world...she really hadn't cared who or what would be lost in this timeline. That sounded so callous, so hard, so not the person she wanted to be; but it had been the truth then and it still was. She'd trade this whole world for a shot at being the recipient of one more of his stupid wisecracks and half-grins. The whole universe: lock, stock, and barrel.

Including these sons which weren't his but were? She shied away from the answer and turned to stumble back to her empty house.

And there he was.

She'd stared dumbly at him, her mouth opening and shutting, fighting for air like a fish out of water. She might have gone down, fainted on the main street in front of the entire town, if he hadn't smiled at her. With a smile that was all his own without a hint of Jack's half-smile, or smirk, or arrogant cynicism.

"Jon O'Neill," he said stretching out a chapped hand with a white scar marring his index finger where a fishing hook had caught him years before. She stared at his smile and his hand. This is not Jack. This is not Jack, she told herself. Not with that smile, not with that scar...Jack's soul had been scarred, his body too, but not his hands. This was not Jack...his eyebrow was smooth and unscarred, and his hair wasn't even completely gray. All the years of parenting had not managed to do what she, Daniel, and Teal'c had accomplished in just a year or two. This is not Jack she told herself and returned his handshake.

"You must be Maggie. I guess you know my sons are all in love with you...it's a real toss-up on who will get to marry you in the end," he told her with a grin.

She realized with a horrifying sense of disbelief that he expected her to stand there and make small talk. If ever she could have chosen to disappear, this would have been the time.

"Let me buy you a Coke," he continued, "and we can compare notes on the boys. Goodness knows you've seen more of them lately than I have." She shook her head and made polite refusing-type noises, but he didn't seem to see her distress and she was helpless to escape his presence. The boys who had dogged her footsteps for the past weeks had disappeared into the corner store and not one was there to come to her rescue. "You can't refuse me," he quipped. "I know all of your secrets."

He didn't know any of them. He never would. And more than that, he wasn't interested in ferreting them out. He just wanted to assure himself she wasn't some lunatic stalking his sons. He wasn't Jack. He had only a passing interest in her. A Coke, all she had to do was drink a Coke and reassure him she didn't eat little boys for breakfast and he'd be off to Canada. She could survive this encounter. She could.

And she did. Because he wasn't Jack, and she didn't see Jack when she looked at him, didn't hear Jack when he spoke. Though he'd always wonder, from that very first meeting she only saw Jon in him. Strange to think she'd seen Jack's son when she'd met a Charlie he had never fathered, but she hadn't seen Jack when she looked into his own face.

She saw a nice man; a kind, good-hearted, hard-working family man impossible not to like. A man concerned with groceries and clean underwear, not P-90's and hyperdrives. Not a man to step gamefully through an open StarGate into the unknown every day of the week. Disappear happily into the backwaters of Minnesota for weeks, maybe even months, on end, but that wasn't even in the same league.

Compared to Jack, Jon with his extraordinary life in a houseboat full of sons was ordinary. Something Jack O'Neill had never been-at least to her. He'd been larger than life, filling a room with his very presence. She clung to the differences and refused to see the similarities, and in that way, as uncomfortable as it was, she managed to survive the encounter.

By the time they'd finished their Cokes and he'd munched his way through an extra-large order of fries, the boys had found them. If his presence wasn't enough to fill the room theirs certainly was. Their laughter and their chatter safely carried her through until she was finally able to make her escape.

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She disappeared while they were gone. Not into the mists of time, but back into the emptiness of her purposeless life.

 _"Get to the Gate," he said and then he died._

 _"No!" she cried and stayed there at his side with Tok'ra disappearing left and right and Mitchell yelling at her to come. Grabbing Daniel and roughly pushing him toward the Gate. Yelling at her again, reaching to grab her and pull her away from Jack. Staring in shock at his hand passing through her shoulder like it wasn't there at all._

 _It wasn't. She was dissolving, disappearing, being wiped from time, vanishing into nothingness._

 _She gasped in relief._

 _This would all be changed. His death would not have happened. He'd still smirk at her waiting to see if she was going to laugh at his dumb joke or not. He'd still grumble about her talking too much, still roll his eyes when Daniel got off on his ancient gods, still convince Teal'c the Simpson's were worth watching. He'd still be there to save the day, the world, the galaxy...to save her._

 _That's when the nightmare began for though time was changing and everything was transforming around him, his body remained unaffected. Time left him untouched. Everything was changing, except his death. It was the one unchangeable thing in the universe._

 _She cried out in despair, but she made no sound for she had disappeared and only his body remained behind._

It was always a shock to wake trembling from the dream and find herself very much still physically present. She'd long ago come to the understanding that no matter how hard she struggled against it one day, when the hopelessness and loss overwhelmed her, she'd do something about that. It had up until David had extended his hand out to her seemed inevitable. And though she wouldn't have admitted it even to herself, it had become almost fine by her. It would have solved some problems and money issues for the folks who watched her life and cut her a check every month. It would have been a weight off of Cam's mind as well. And an open door for Daniel.

But in a month-or less, the boys would be watching for her to make her way down to the lake. All the stories of the wonders and things they'd seen on their trip would be welling up in them to share with her. She couldn't leave them waiting for her; she had never been that cruel. And she found to her surprise, she wanted to hear what they had to tell her.

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David plopped onto the bench beside Jon. "I miss Maggie," he said.

"So that's what you've been moping about? The whole lot of you? I wondered what was up."

"She's a real nice lady, Dad."

"Yeah, I noticed that."

"Real pretty, too."

"Yep."

"And smart. She's real smart."

"Oh?"

"Yep. And she doesn't get water sick, I asked her once."

"That's good."

"Yep...she ain't got no one. Just us to keep her company."

"That so?"

"Yep. I asked her once and she said she didn't."

"Really? She said, "I ain't got no one,' just like that, did she?"

"Daaaad! You know what I mean."

"Yep, just not sure what you want me to do about it."

"Well, I was thinking-the others and I were thinking, seeing she's so nice and pretty and all alone-"

"And smart, don't forget smart," he interjected not bothering to hide his smile.

"This is serious, Dad."

"What, then?"

"Well, we were thinking, seeing she's all that and all alone...and she likes us-a lot, I think, and we like her a lot too-and you and her seemed to be getting along pretty well in the café, and...and all. Well..."

"Well, what, Son? You want to call her when we get to a phone...say 'hi'?"

"That'd be nice, but...we were thinking more like you could...you know."

"Haven't a clue."

Charlie laughed behind them, "I think he's suggesting you marry her, Dad."

David lowered his head and scrunched his shoulders up like a turtle.

Jon couldn't help reaching out a hand and rubbing his head. He tried to keep the laugh out of his voice but wasn't quite successful. "Well, that sort of thing works in the movies and books, but it's not that simple. Besides, we're all right, aren't we? The way we are? We wouldn't want to risk messing that up. And I imagine she might have something to say about it seeing she probably figures she's just fine the way she is, too. She doesn't even know me, and I doubt she'd be interested in getting to know me like that-I'm way too old, and I've got a whole boatload of pesky boys besides."

"You're not that old, Dad," Charlie said with a wink. Jon gave him a 'you are not helping here' look that only made the laugh his son had been hiding slip through.

David didn't notice. "And she likes us, Dad, she does," he said popping back up hopefully. "So all you'd have to do is let her get to know you...you're nice enough-I bet she'd like you fine."

"Liking someone and wanting to marry them are not the same things, David."

"Yes, Sir," David said and dropped his head once more.

"She could do worse though," Charlie said, "and so could you, Dad."

"What's that supposed to mean? You're not serious are you? Surely you're not in on this too?"

"Nah. I'm just saying."

"Well, I'll take it under advisement, but in the meantime, I suppose someone better start thinking about what's for supper. Come on, David. Help me whip something up."

"You know, she can probably cook, too. That would be a plus, right?" David asked uncurling from the bench and looking hopefully up at him.

He grunted. "I can cook just fine," he said. "Besides, she's probably one of those health nuts who only cooks soybeans and asparagus anyway."

"Oh no, Dad, she eats junk just like us!" David assured him. Jon and Charlie shared a grin over his earnest head.

Maggie Clark had made quite an impression on his boys. And Jon couldn't deny, he'd felt drawn to her in the few minutes he'd spent in her company himself. Of course, he'd been hearing about her for weeks by then which probably explained why he'd found her so compelling. But even so, despite what his sons might hope, he hadn't fallen for her over a Coke and a large order of fries.

How could he have when he barely knew her and knew nothing about her? He frowned then because for all the time the boys had spent with her and all the not-so-gentle probing the townfolk had given her, she was still the mysterious stranger come to stay. He had no doubt the boys had managed to tell her all of his secrets (what few there were, tantalizing ones like the fact he couldn't be bothered to match his socks and figured who noticed anyway?) but they'd gleaned very few, if any, of hers.

Her wide blue eyes and smile hinted at openness and honesty, but he thought she was hiding something behind them. He'd gotten the impression she was frightened...of him. He pursed his lips and shook his head at that thought. Unless she was some sort of a psychopath stalking his sons, she had nothing to fear from him. Nothing at all. He'd leave her in peace with her secrets intact. They didn't affect him or his boys.

The town had been agog when she'd first arrived with her few boxes of belongings and remarkable resemblance to the astronaut who'd sacrificed herself to save her crew and a good chunk of the East Coast when the shuttle had gone down. That had all blown over now, thankfully, but he supposed it might explain her apprehension. If so, she had no need to worry he'd ever bring it up.

 _The interrupted programming announcing a catastrophe in the making had barely registered on his aching consciousness. He'd been stretched out in his bed with the baby's sweaty, feverish body sprawled on his chest and the other little boys pressing up against him. All of them too sick with a nasty stomach bug to even groan when the news flash had replaced some mindless cartoon or another._

 _"The 7-up is gone, and at this rate, we'll be out of Tylenol by midnight," Jamie had said, sticking her dark head through the door and resolutely refusing to see Josh puking into an ice cream bucket. "Seeing as I'm the only one still on my feet, I guess I better make a run to the store." And she'd gone out into the storm without him even uttering a 'be careful' after her._

 _"Love you guys," she'd called from the door, but he was dumping Ty off of him and making a dash for the bathroom and hadn't answered. By the time Samantha Carter's crew were safely drifting down in their chutes and she was piloting the shuttle away from millions of New Englanders, the state troopers were at his door saying, "Mr. O'Neill? We're sorry. There's been an accident."_

 _The face that looked remarkably like the stranger his sons had fallen in love with had been splashed all over the TV screens, newspapers, and magazines of America for the next week or two, but he'd never seen it. Almost a year later when the end of the year recaps brought the shuttle accident back up, he and Danny had exchanged surprised looks, and he'd said, "I didn't know we lost another shuttle. When did that happened?"_

It had been apparent, however, that the rest of the townsfolk didn't share in his ignorance. After hearing it about a dozen times too many he'd protested, "For crying out loud, obviously everyone who looks at her doesn't swear she's the spitting image of Samantha Carter because I don't! I don't even know what the woman looked like!"

Marla, the waitress at the café, had snootily informed him that he was quite probably the only adult in America who didn't. But, if he wanted to know all he had to do was take a gander at the stranger in town; she was the spitting image of Samantha Carter.

As gawking at strangers was not an activity he indulged in and the fish were calling his name, he hadn't bothered. Of course, he hadn't known then she would bewitch his little boys. If he had, he might have torn himself away from the fishing and trip preparations to at least glance her way. Maybe. The fishing had been exceptionally good, the trip preparations extra important with Charlie and the grandsons coming along for the first time in forever, and every report he heard about her harmless and benign.

It wasn't like they were running the streets of the Twin Cities with a stranger after all. If anything would have seemed the slightest bit off, half the town would have hustled down to the shore and shouted it over the water to him. But, of course, they hadn't because she was harmless.

She was also a good influence on the boys. Since meeting her, the books they lugged home from the library all had a distinctly scientific and educational slant. By the end of the summer, if it continued, they'd be ready to launch their own shuttle. From the report cards he'd seen on the last day of school, it wouldn't hurt the boys to pick up a few things from her.

But that didn't mean he was putting on a clean shirt and knocking on her door with a marriage proposal even if his boys thought she was lonely. When did they become such romantics anyway?

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The boys were glad to be back, and he discovered things with Maggie were more serious than he had thought.

They suggested to him that maybe they should postpone their next trip out...a storm might be brewing or something. When he assured them the old boat was good for at least another season of gales and squalls, they'd mused that as they had all the extra room with Charlie and his boys gone back to Oregon and Matt and Danny back to their jobs and lives in Duluth, they might as well invite a friend or two along...just so the trip wouldn't be so lonesome, of course.

"I fail to see how the lot of us could possibly get lonely with all the stuff we've got planned. It won't be a problem," he'd told them.

Well then, did he realize there were people in the world all alone, Maggie for instance, who were terribly lonesome and it wouldn't be right not to invite someone like that along when you had such a great trip planned out, would it?

"You'd bring some strange woman on my boat?" he'd squawked indignantly just to see their reaction.

"Maggie's not a stranger, Dad!"

"And she's real quiet...you wouldn't hardly have to know she was onboard."

"She doesn't eat much either."

"Or take up much room."

"We'd look after her, Dad...make sure she doesn't sink the boat or anything like that!"

He'd looked at their anxious faces, and allowed, as she'd be so trouble-free, they could try to talk her into coming out to the boat for an afternoon of fishing. But that would have to do them. 'The Boys' Home' wasn't a cruise ship after all.

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The visit to the boat was against her better judgment; even her worst judgment counseled against it.

So why did she go? Maybe because she'd said 'no' to too many fishing invitations already, said it and lived to regret it. Maybe. But, she blamed it on the boys' award-worthy persuasive arguments and deep, brown eyes. She thought even Senator Kinsey couldn't have stood against their pleas.

"Welcome aboard," he told her stretching out a long arm to give her a hand up.

"Thanks," she'd said and let the boys pull her away in their excitement to show her around. With everything there was to see on the boat, she managed to avoid him right up until suppertime.

Even then, the boys served as an effective buffer. "Hope you like fish" and "Thanks, it's great, really" pretty much summed up what they had to say to each other during the meal. She had the feeling that was as okay with him as it was with her. The boys had spent the past week extolling his virtues when they were with her, and more than likely he'd had his fill of hers as well. Not that the boys were done yet.

"Dad's a real good cook. He can cook lots more than fish. Like, um..."

"Hot dogs. He's really good with hot dogs!"

"And hamburgers."

"Yeah, his hamburgers are really good. The best. He makes 'em black and crunchy...no one makes hamburgers like, Dad." She couldn't help laughing at that. Jack had had a similar (though she guessed more alcoholic) way with hamburgers which explained why she'd never requested them when he'd offered to cook.

Hearing her laugh, Jon leaned over to stage-whisper, "Subtle, aren't they?

She'd laughed again while the boys demanded to know what he was saying.

"I'm saying, my dear young men, that we are on to you...and also that you should give it a rest. Unless you're hankering to go to bed as soon as chores are done without any of the most fabulous dessert in the entire world. In which case you can just go on the way you've been."

The boys clammed up quickly. Which would have been a nice change if it hadn't left just the two of them to carry the conversation. Into the awkward silence she said, "So let me guess...cake?"

"You told her," he accused the boys.

"Not us...you wouldn't tell us, remember?"

Travis snorted and offered his only utterance of the evening, "What's that got to do with anything? Everyone knows if Dad's in charge of dessert it's cake."

"Fine," Jon said. "The real question is, what kind?" To his surprise, Ty climbed into Maggie's lap while she pondered her answer. He pulled her arms around him and laid his head against her chest as though he thought he belonged there. She absentmindedly brushed her lips over the top of his head as through he did.

"Pumpkin with chocolate frosting," she finally said after having given the question due consideration.

Jon, his eyes on his youngest son in her arms, almost missed his cue. He grimaced and said, "What! Who eats pumpkin cake with chocolate frosting? You blew it. You almost made us believe you knew what you were talking about but...pumpkin with chocolate frosting!" He shook his head in mock disgust while the boys laughed.

"Try again, Maggie," David urged her, and she blew out her cheeks in simulated concentration. She knew as well as they did exactly what kind of cake they would all soon been eating. Jack had liked all kinds (except for pumpkin) but when it was up to him he had always and only picked white with chocolate frosting.

"Hmmm, if not pumpkin it must be chocolate with vanilla frosting."

The boys groaned, and he shook his head and said, "Last chance."

Ty pulled her head down and whispered in her ear. "White with chocolate frosting," she announced triumphantly, and they cheered her as though she'd performed a great feat.

Later when she'd turned from the lake and walked back to her silent, empty house after coming to shore, she could still hear their laughing, happy voices ringing out over the water.

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"See, Dad? She really is nice."

"Yes, David. She's just as nice and smart and pretty as you said...but you've got to admit, she doesn't know a thing about cake." Not that that one little foible was likely to save him. He'd only ever loved the one woman, and he'd never expected to ever love another, but...she was everything the boys had told him and more. Could he really be falling in love with someone that quickly?

Of course, he could. Jamie had fallen in love with him in his grandfather's garage over a box of hound pups. He'd stood there, shuffling his feet and wishing her and her brother would hurry up and pick the pup they wanted already so he could get back to his fishing and never guessing what was happening right before his eyes. Had she went home that afternoon, cuddling the little black pup and already missing him even though he'd never said a word directly to her? Maybe she had.

That had worked out all right. Twenty-six years, ten sons, summers on the boat, winters working to pay for the summers and keep the boys fed and clothed...lots of laughs and no regrets. He looked out over the water and wondered how he could possibly be falling in love with someone else while missing her so badly.

And wondering just how big a fool he really was. A woman like that was never going to fall for the likes of him. She was nearer Charlie's age than his for one thing. And way smarter than him. She was also grieving over a loss of her own if he were any judge. Plus, he was far too encumbered with dependents. Whether she liked them a lot as David presumed or not, a boatload of boys wasn't something most women would have toted up on the plus side.

And though he still hadn't figured out why, she was scared to death of him. What on earth was there about him to scare her?

Unless...she was afraid of falling in love. Which was, as he had just been thinking, ridiculous. He was a fool; a certifiable idiot to think she was ever going to feel anything for him.

"So you like her, huh?" David pressed on.

"I like her, Son. I like a lot of people, but that doesn't mean I'm marrying them."

"They're not Maggie though. You wait, Dad. If you get to know her, you really will like her. I know it."

"David, enough."

"Yes, Sir."


	3. Fighting Reality

_"Get to the Gate," he said._

 _"No," she cried._

 _"Go," he said with his last breath, his eyes locked on her willing her to go, to survive, to live._

 _Jon grabbed her, pulled her up, ran with her through the Gate. Daniel lay on the other side. His left leg was severed just below the knee and blood gushed from the stump. "Daniel!" she cried falling at his side._

 _"Go," he told her. "Get to the Gate."_

 _"No," she said._

 _"Go," he said again with his last breath, his eyes locked on her willing her to go, to survive, to live._

 _Jon grabbed her, pulled her up, and ran with her through the Gate. Cam was walking away on the other side._

 _"Cam," she called after him._

 _"Carter, get a life," he answered without even turning around._

 _Jon laughed beside her. "Well, that's a fine howdy-do," he said._

 _"What?" she asked._

 _"Don't worry about it. How about some cake?"_

 _"I...I don't know," she stammered._

 _"What could it hurt?" he asked._

 _"All right, then," she said. "I'll take a piece." And the world blew up around them._

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She'd never been good at lying and found she was even worse at lying to little boys with deep brown eyes. But she didn't let that stop her. 'Sorry, I don't have time today.' "Sorry, I've some things I just have to get done.' "Sorry, I'm breaking your little hearts, but I can't take the risk spending time with you carries with it.' 'Sorry, I'm terrified I'm falling in love with your dad and that's why I'm avoiding spending any more time with you than absolutely necessary.' Because spending time with them was necessary. Necessary because she couldn't turn her back on them and hurt them any more than she already was. And necessary because they were all that was keeping her from disappearing.

So she kept the time she spent with them to the barest minimum and wept with relief when _The Boys' Home_ (Cool name, huh, Maggie? Get it? It used to be _Fisherman's Dream,_ but after I was born Dad said no way any fisherman would dream of staying on a boat with all us noisy boys scaring the fish away, so...cool, huh?) set off on its next voyage.

What had she been thinking going over there, spending time with him? No, he wasn't Jack, but he was so many of the things she'd loved about Jack. He was in essence Jack without the bitter core, without the hardness, without thirty plus years of medals pinned to his chest and all that they'd cost burned into his soul, without the guilt of Charlie's death. How could she have loved Jack and been fool enough to believe she could spend an afternoon on Jon's boat without falling in love with him? So what she'd done her best not to talk to him? She and Jack had never needed words either.

Jack. A year later and his loss was still a gaping, bleeding wound. She missed him, oh, she missed him. How could she be falling in love with Jon missing Jack so badly? And what did that make her, falling in love with his counterpart?

If she'd truly loved him (and in spite of her best efforts and in spite of all the years she'd fought it, she had truly loved him) wouldn't loving this man who was so not him be...what? Sick, perverse. When he held her in the dark, who would she dream was holding her? A dead man? How would Jon feel if he ever learned of Jack? Wouldn't he always wonder if she would have loved him if not for all those years of loving Jack? Or if she really truly loved him, Jon O'Neill, at all, or just the man he reminded her of?

And what if she couldn't be sure of that herself?

And more than that. Horribly more than that, if she grew to love Jon too much, if she'd choose life with him and his boys on that boat over the chance to right the timeline, wouldn't she knowingly, willingly be letting Jack die? As long as she lived and carried in her the knowledge that this timeline was wrong, as long there was the remotest possibility it might one day be restored and he might live, didn't she owe him that? Wouldn't doing otherwise be in a sense murder?

Because to her, he was out there somewhere very much alive. MIA not KIA. That perceived difference (and perceived it was for she had knelt at his side and watched him die) was a very real problem with her loving Jon. (Or anyone new for that matter.) It was the difference between starting over and betraying their love; the difference between widowhood and adultery.

 _"Carter. What are you doing here?" he'd asked in surprise when she'd shown up at his office in the Pentagon. "Aren't you supposed to be heading offworld in-" he checked his watch, "fifteen minutes?"_

 _"I can't do this anymore, Sir," she'd said, and he'd frowned at the desperation in her voice._

 _"Do what?"_

 _"This," she had answered motioning in the air between them. He'd wrinkled his face in incomprehension. "This three or four feet we always have between us...this distance."_

 _His eyes had widened with awakening understanding. "Ahh," he'd said. "So what would it take to bridge that distance, Carter? And are you sure that's what you want?"_

 _"I don't know, Sir. I just can't do this anymore. I'll resign if that's what you want."_

 _He had taken three steps and closed the distance between them. "That's not what I want-I'll handle the paperwork. I'm wondering more on a diamond or just a band...and what size are we talking about anyway?"_

And after all the struggling and denial, it really had been that easy. (Being on a first name basis with the commander-in-chief had its benefits.) Though they'd been asked to keep things quiet, getting the go-ahead hadn't been all that difficult. Distance had continued to be a problem with her either offworld or under the Mountain and him in Washington most of the time, but 1,500 miles had proven to be easier to bridge than those few feet that had always separated them before.

Nothing could bridge the distance between them now; she would go on missing him for the rest of her life. She'd spent the past year trying to figure out a way to get back to him. But he remained both dead to her and erased from time. Would falling in love with Jon really be a betrayal of her love for Jack or simply a continuation? He'd ordered them to the Gate because he had wanted them to go on living after him, not so they would be trapped in the moment of his death for the rest of their lives.

Oh, where was Teal'c when she needed him? He would see through all of her confusion and give her a clear, simplistic answer to cling to. But he was as gone from her life as Jack.

She called Cam.

"I don't know what you want me to tell you. You do what you've got to do," he'd said and hung up. Their inability to act had first embittered him and then...what? Defeated him? Or set him free? She didn't know. He'd stopped railing against their fate, embraced this life, and made a place for himself in it. But she couldn't really believe he'd given up. If the chance ever came, surely he'd be in line right behind her and Daniel to grab it. She could count on that, but until then-Carter, get a life.

He'd washed his hands of her and Daniel. Not that she blamed him. He'd been the mission commander, and they were reminders he'd failed (in a spectacular way, through no fault of his own) to bring them home safely. They were a weight he couldn't bear, a responsibility he could never fulfill.

Not to mention they were a mess, both of them.

"So, you haven't disappeared yet." Daniel at his worst. Bitter and angry, striking out. She shouldn't have called.

"No..."

"Still thinking about it?"

"Feeling," she corrected. "I try not to think about it."

"He's dead, S-" he cut off the end of her forbidden name before he went on, "he can't order you not to think too much anymore."

"Daniel, please don't."

"I'm just saying it's an idea worth thinking about. I'm thinking about it a lot lately. Today. Just now when you called in fact." She'd been wrong. She should have called. Today and every day. She should never have left him on his own. Only, they'd given her no choice; too many calls and there'd be trouble to pay. Too many letters, emails, or cards and they'd lose the chance at any contact at all.

His voice now devoid of any emotion, he went on, "Maybe Cam's right. Maybe we should give it up, settle in, get married, have a houseful of kids." She knew what he was saying. If they could do that, they could admit defeat, give up, and die because there was no reason for them to hold themselves together anymore. All hope was lost. They could disappear forever.

And being with Jon would do the same thing. It would mean she'd given up on their world, Jack, and Daniel as well. What had she come to that she could even think it? And how, once started, did she stop?

"It's not time for that, Daniel," she said and was surprised at how much she meant it. "Leave it awhile."

"Haven't we waited long enough? I'm sorry I said it, but it's true. He's dead; everyone's dead. We can't keep pretending otherwise. It's over. Kaput. Finished."

"No," she pleaded with him. "It's not."

"What if it is?"

"Even if it is, we're not."

"Oh? And just what have you done to prove you're not dead already? Maybe you have already disappeared and don't even know it."

She hesitated. She'd called to tell him; whether to beg his counsel or his forgiveness she wasn't sure. But, now...he was already contemplating the ultimate disappearing act, how could she tell him now?

"Well? I'm waiting." Waiting for her to give him permission. But he had to know she never would. Not until she herself was already forever gone.

She couldn't, wouldn't be giving him the go-ahead, not today. Instead, almost defiantly, she said, "I've spent an afternoon on a houseboat."

That answer was unexpected enough it took him a moment to respond. When he did, she knew she'd managed to stir his curiosity. "A houseboat, you say?"

"Yeah. I want you to come to Minnesota...come be with me. I'll cross the _T'_ s and dot the _I_ 's to get it all okayed and arranged."

He ignored her suggestion and asked, "What were you doing on a houseboat?"

"Will you come?"

"Will you just answer the question?"

"I was," she meant to say 'visiting' but instead she said, "falling in love."

"Oh," he said after a stunned moment of silence. And then, he laughed and sounding like the old Daniel said, "Missed my chance again, didn't I?"

"I'll throw him over for you...just come, all right?"

"I'm not coming to Minnesota," he said. "But I'll make you a deal, you do what I said: settle down, marry this guy, and have a houseful of kids, and I'll stick around to see how it all turns out. Cross my heart and hope to die and all that."

"He already has a boatful of kids; and, Daniel, I already married him."

"What? My invitation must have gotten lost in the mail."

"You were there."

"You-you're not serious," he said, his voice low and desperate. Cam had hardly reacted at all when she'd told him she'd met Jack's counterpart, but Daniel...he was as stricken as she was herself. He understood her turmoil without her having to say another word.

"I am, that's why I need you to come. I can't do this. Tell me what to do, Daniel." She was begging, almost sobbing into the phone. Cam would have told her to get a grip and hung up. Jack himself would have snarled, "For crying out loud, knock that off!" but then he would have said, "Come here" and held her while she cried.

Daniel swallowed hard into the phone and said, "I'm sorry, Sam. I'm so sorry," for once not caring whether their handlers were listening and waiting for them to break the rules. And then he waited in silence while she fought for control before asking, "Where's he in all of this? You haven't-he doesn't know?"

"No, no, he doesn't know anything. And maybe he won't ever love me...I don't know-"

"Listen, if it's him, he'll love you, any world, every world. You can bank on that."

"Well, he doesn't yet-he hardly knows me."

"Then you have to decide now what you want to do or get out of there. Come here. Until you know what to do."

And so, she went to Chicago. What choice did she have?

Although the agreements they had been forced to sign had made allowances for them to occasionally see each other, jumping through the hoops to do so had required more motivation and energy than she had been able to dredge up before. Or maybe she had just assumed it would. Because given a choice between facing her quagmire alone in Minnesota or with Daniel in Chicago, she managed to wade through the necessary paperwork and interviews within the week.

From his apartment window, Daniel watched her pull up in a small, nondescript, practical car which doubtlessly had an impressive MPG but probably couldn't pull seventy on the steeper hills. It was not the car for Sam. But, then it wasn't Sam Carter he was watching slowly climb out of the car and trudge around to pull out an overnight bag. It was Maggie Clark, and he felt the cold burn of anger rush through him at the sight of her.

How dare they turn Sam who'd lit up every room she'd ever entered into this beaten down, ordinary woman? And how dare she let them? He willed her to look around with even a hint of interest or to at least glance up and see him standing there watching her. But, she didn't.

He shuffled out into the hallway to meet her on her way up, and it didn't help still the anger burning within him when she arrived via the elevator instead of the stairs. It was only one measly flight of stairs up; since when did she take the elevator for one measly flight of stairs?

"What's wrong with the stairs?" he grumbled at her before she'd even exited the elevator.

The smile that had begun to light her face faded at his words and tone. He scowled at her waiting for her to blush and apologize, to tacitly acknowledge that she had allowed them to defeat her. Instead, she met his frown with one of her own. "It smells like something died in the stairwell if you must know," she said. "I didn't want to run into whatever it was."

"Oh," he said his anger dying away at the sound of her voice.

"It's good to see you, Daniel," she said. He couldn't answer because where a moment before he'd seen only Maggie Clark he now could only see Sam, and he'd been missing her far too long. "It's been too long," she said echoing his thought. She reached out to hug him and he pulled her into his embrace.

"It's good to see you, too, Sam," he said and was surprised at how true his words were.

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Daniel's apartment was as empty as her cabin; his life as empty as hers. But she'd known that hadn't she? Separated from each other, stripped of everything that had given them meaning and purpose, captive to a world that held nothing for them but bitter reminders of all they had lost, living with the knowledge that they'd failed their own world-what was left for them to fill their lives with?

There was in the corner of his living room/bedroom, under an ever growing pile of dust, a stack of archeological magazines that matched the pile of scientific journals lurking somewhere beneath the junk mail on top of her kitchen table back at the cabin. Sad testimonies of their feeble efforts to not lose the people they had been.

But they had. Who could have believed that SG-1 would end like this? "There's always a Plan B," Jack had insisted and even though she'd shaken her head and said, "Not this time, Sir," there always had been. Until there wasn't.

Until there wasn't because there no longer ever had been.

'If you lived in this timeline...' Landry had said and what argument could they give against the truth of his statement?

Malikai had stated with all the certainty of his obsession, "It doesn't matter," when they'd told him of the harm he was doing to world after world. And they'd condemned him for it. Teal'c had blasted away his own alternate in a doomed timeline and calmly stated that theirs was the only reality of consequence. And the arrogance of that statement had left even Jack with a bad taste in his mouth.

So under Landry's gaze, she'd had to admit that regardless of Malikai's assertion that it didn't matter, it did. It had been the last thing she had wanted to admit, the last thing she had wanted to act upon, but she was an Air Force officer charged with acting and living with integrity.* Integrity, the act of doing what is right regardless of the consequences. She'd admitted those other lives mattered because it was the right thing to do; but she couldn't live with the consequences.

Because the price of that admission had been their world. She'd sacrificed the countless lives of her own timeline for those of this altered reality. Countless lives that had mattered every bit as much as those others ones. Lives that it had been her job to serve and to protect.

She'd stood before the flag and pledged her loyalty to her country. Entered into an oath to faithfully discharge her duties as an officer of the United States Air Force:

I, Samantha Carter, having been appointed a colonel in the

United States Air Force do solemnly swear that I will support

and defend the Constitution of the United States against all

enemies, foreign and domestic;

that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same,

that I take this obligation freely; without any mental reservation

or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge

the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter,

so help me God.

And then she'd gotten lost. Lost in time, lost in heart, and lost in soul. So lost she couldn't even reason within herself just where her allegiance rested. Did she owe it to the country which viewed her as a threat and in which she now lived as an outcast? Or the country from which she'd come...the one which she'd felt morally obligated to turn her back on in that airport hangar at McMurdo?

Did the fact it would not have made any difference to the outcome if she would had continued to fight tooth and nail release her from her oath? She couldn't have stormed the Mountain with nothing but her determination. Not even General Jack O'Neill if he would have made the transition with them could have fought the entire government and might of this nation. There had been nothing she could have done, but still it had been her duty to put the needs of her country before her own well-being...had she done so when she'd given up fighting for a chance to right the timeline?

Could she say in all honestly that she had performed her duties well and faithfully? Or had she fallen down on the job, put self before service and betrayed the trust her nation had placed in her? Could she in good conscience embrace this world, accept that the old one was lost, give up the pretense of waiting and watching for a way to make everything right again?

She'd fled to Chicago because she couldn't face the thorny personal issue of loving a man who was and was not the man she'd pledged her life and love to, but in the emptiness of Daniel's life she was brought face to face with the larger issue that she'd been hiding from all along. No wonder she'd spent the last year seeking nothing but oblivion.

That first afternoon and evening they spent discussing very little of any import, as though what needed said could not safely be addressed directly but instead had to be approached carefully and circumspectly. They discussed her drive down (all right, bit windy, but all right), his apartment (bit small, but it was fine), his neighborhood (bit pricey, but it wasn't like he had anything else to spend his money on); they did not discuss the man she was running from or the one they'd left for dead in a time that no longer existed.

He eventually did get around to showing her the book. "Look at this," he said holding it out to her. She turned it over and over again in her hands. It was the book he'd had in him to write before he'd taken a trip to Abydos through the StarGate. The book the StarGate Program had made certain he never published. "Can you believe that picture?" he asked nodding at the back cover. "What a geek."

"Daniel!" she chided with a smile. The smile she'd perfected in this timeline...small, sometimes ironic, sometimes sad, but always a weak imitation of the real thing.

"Well, come on, you've can't tell me I look like that-"

"Weeelll," she said with a laugh that was no more the genuine article than the smile.

He frowned at her and asked something that had been bothering him since he'd found the book. "So you're dead-the you from here I mean, Cam never existed, but what about me? This geek and I are both running around and I'm not turning inside out."

"You mean, why aren't you experiencing Cascade Failure? Simple actually. Cascade Failure results from two separate realities intersecting, jockeying for the same point in time and space. This isn't an alternate universe/reality/whatever you want to call it. This is our world. Turned upside down, altered, perverted; but ours. We belong here."

"And the Daniel Jackson in Egypt doesn't?" he asked.

"Look at him, Daniel...does he look like he belongs anywhere?" she said lightly holding up the book so he could see the picture.

It was later, lying side by side in the dark as they had on a hundred different worlds, he asked, "So this messed up world is our own? I don't get that. There are too many differences. More even than those we've seen in other realities."

"That doesn't matter. It may seem like a different universe, but it's ours. Only altered by changes made in time. This isn't a parallel universe where the StarGate Program never happened. It happened, we've lived it. Not alternate versions of us, but us. What we see all around us, Daniel...this world, it's our world. The changes we see are the direct results of a military strike against the forces fighting Baal. Somehow or another, he went back in time and struck at us where he knew we couldn't stop him."

"But, it all boils down to the same thing, doesn't it?" he asked. "We've got two different realities going on-the one we left and this one."

"No. Not at all. That's true with parallel universes; there are multiple realities going on at all times. But, with this-we didn't leave our old reality behind. It's gone, wiped out, forever lost unless we find a way to undo what he did."

"Vanished," he said in too quiet of a voice.

"Yes."

After a few minutes of silence, he said, "OK. Let's say I understand there is a difference, it doesn't really change things for us does it? Either way we'd still need to get to the StarGate and find a way to put things right?"

"No," she said again. "With our situation, we do...just like the second SG-1 that went back to Giza to undo-or attempt to anyway-what the first team had screwed up. But in an alternate reality, there'd be no putting things right again-unless we started messing around with time there, too. All we could really do would be try to influence the course of events happening while we were there...we might alter the future but the past would remain unchanged. Like when the other Carter and Kawalsky came over from their reality? We helped them contact the Asgard in their universe and put up a defense against the Goa'uld, but the damage their Earth had already sustained wasn't wiped out."

"Gotcha...I guess I knew all that. It's just...it's just I'd like to think the people we knew-their lives were going on like before. I mean I know things would be different because of what has been changed, but I'd like to think they found a way to strike back at Baal..."

"That they're not waiting on us to save them," she wearily finished for him.

"Yeah."

"Me, too, Daniel. I wish it every day, because I don't know how to save them...I think about it all the time. I know there has to be a way, but I can't find it."

"Maybe there isn't one. Maybe there isn't anything wrong with you going back to Minnesota and letting the man in that houseboat fall in love with you." He spoke carefully, avoiding speaking Jack's name. Because even after a year, they both found speaking the name of their dead much too difficult.

"Maybe that would be true if it all ended there, but the war isn't over, Daniel. Baal isn't done. He's coming and this timeline-they have nothing to stop him or even slow him down. Earth will provide him with a Jaffa army the likes of which the Goa'uld have never imagined. He'll enslave billions, and when they rebel (and they will) he'll destroy them. Landry was right, the lives in this timeline matter, but whether we go back and change them or not, they are lost."

"Then they'll get exactly what they asked for," he said, and the bitterness that had vanished in her presence now came storming back full force. "Because we're out of the battle, Sam. They've made us casualties of this war!"

"Not casualties, Daniel, prisoners. Our world is lost, theirs is dying, and they won't let us do a single thing to help! We're prisoners of war." Bitterness was his trademark response to the pain of their circumstances; depression hers. But, his bitterness was clearly echoed in her voice. He reached out his hand and found hers to offer what comfort he could.

He'd spent a lot of time trying to push her away since they'd been lost in time. His pain made him want to strike out and hurt someone, but not her-he'd done what he could to keep her out of harm's way. Her pain had left her both needy (something he could not reconcile to the Sam Carter he'd known over their years on SG-1) and empathetic (something that she'd always been to a degree though suffering had honed it to an all new level.)

He knew she felt his pain as her own, and knowing that made him hurt all the more which fed the bitterness which made him push her away harder than ever which hurt her more...and around and around they went in a cycle of hurt and pain that never ended. What was the old nursery rhyme? This is the house that Jack built. Only in this case, the house that Jack's death had built.

She broke into that train of thought and pulled him back to where he'd left her, "And the first duty of a prisoner is to escape." And there it is, he thought. The reason she's here, the crux of the matter. Could she admit there was no way to escape, no way to save either their world or this one, no way to keep Jack from dying? Could she stop fighting and live out whatever time they had left before Baal returned as though none of that mattered? Was it all right for her to reach for a little bit of happiness?

"Tell me about the boat," he said gently, carefully as though he were pulling a bandage off of a fresh wound because for all the theory they'd bandied around, he knew facing the empirical truth would be much more difficult for both of them.

"It's called T _he Boys' Home_ , appropriately enough."

"Meaning what exactly?"

"Meaning that boatload of kids I mentioned? They're all boys. Ten of them though three are grown and out on their own."

"So. Ten sons. I take it there's not a mom onboard?"

"Not anymore. She died. I don't know how."

"Sarah?"

"No. Well, maybe. But I don't think so. The boys don't look like they are hers."

"Whose then?"

"Jack's. They look like Jack's," she said with a hard and brittle voice. He knew it was only the bitterness still spewing out of her that made it possible for her to say that name.

"And...how is he?"

"Dead. He's dead, Daniel, just like you said." And now the bitterness gave way to sorrow. He turned to his side, pulled her to him, and held her close.

"All right," he said gently. "Then tell me about the captain of T _he Boys' Home_."

"Jon. His name is Jon. And I can't do this, Daniel. Let's talk about something else."

"All right," he said again. "Did I tell you I called that guy-the geek who wrote my book?"

"No."

"I did. Not sure why. It didn't accomplish anything."

"Oh."

"Yeah. And then, after you called the other day? I made another call."

"To Egypt?"

"No, to the Academy Hospital in Colorado Springs...she wasn't there, had never been there."

"No," she said understanding immediately what he was saying just like he had known she would. "The Gate never made it to Cheyenne Mountain. There was no reason for her to be stationed there. She's at Walter Reed in D.C."

"You know that or you're guessing?"

"I know it."

"You've talked to her?"

"No. I googled her."

"Still, she's alive-I could go to her-"

"And be in the same spot I'm in. You don't want that. Don't do it!" He'd thought about it quite a bit since she'd told him she'd met the Jack of this timeline. He could be in the same boat so to speak. Only of course it wouldn't be exactly the same because he and Janet had only begun when she'd been killed while Jack and Sam...well, he wasn't sure there had been a time when they hadn't already begun.

"Sam, if we can't save the world-in either timeline-what's wrong with you being with him or me being with her?"

"Everything. Nothing. I don't know!" She wept then, hot, bitter tears that scorched his chest while he held her and she cried against him.

And though they spent the rest of their allotted time rehashing and reexamining and talking the subject to death, they were as unable to resolve it as they were to get through the StarGate and save the world.

JSJSJSJSJSJSJS

The boys hit the shore before he'd finished mooring the boat. They'd been subdued, even melancholy at times, through most of the trip. But then so had he. Given their attachment to Maggie, their emotional state was only natural. But his? What call did he have to want nothing more than to leave the boat adrift and join his sons in their headlong rush to see her again? She was nothing to him. Well, time to quit deceiving yourself about that one, O'Neill. He was nothing to her. His name wouldn't be found on her list of friends; he was hardly even an acquaintance. But, she was definitely something to him.

Travis, joining the boys for the trip to shore in order to fetch their pile of mail before the post office closed for the day, shook his head at his eager brothers. "I can understand what you see in Maggie, but what does she see in the lot of you?" he joked.

The boys were too excited to even hear him, but it echoed too closely Jon's own insecurities. He couldn't think what he had to offer that would make Maggie Clark ever see anything in him. Unlike David, he didn't think just getting to know him would do the trick. He was too old for this nonsense...he was not going to make a fool of himself chasing after her.

Travis returned with both the mail and the boys before Jon had made much more than a start at the work.

"What's up?" Jon asked as he secured the dingy in its berth. David, too disappointed to trust his voice, shook his head and pushed past him in a rush to get to his bunk. Jon let him go. "I take it she's not home?" he asked Josh.

"No. We asked at the café. They say she's been gone a week or so all ready."

"Oh."

"Yeah. No one knows where she went."

Jon looked at the disappointed faces of his sons and said, "I doubt that. The folks in town may not, but it's not really their business, is it? Or ours. Maggie's a grown woman and quite able to take care of herself. It's hardly the end of the world that she's not home."

They didn't get the hint. "But, what if she doesn't come back? What if she packed up all her stuff and left for good?" Bryan asked.

"Without telling you all good by when you've been such good friends? That's pretty unlikely, don't you think? Instead of moping about, sort the mail for me, will ya? There's bound to be some bills in there that need paid if we're going to stay afloat."

Her note was there, mixed in with all the credit card offers and bills and reminders of appointments he'd already missed that Travis had carted home from the post office. It was short and said nothing more than they had already learned:

Dear David, Bryan, Zech, Alex, and Ty,

I've had to leave for a while. I didn't want you to worry

if you came back and I was gone. Tell Josh and Travis 'hi' for me.

Hope you had a great time on your voyage.

Your friend, Maggie.

"See?" Jon said trying not to mind he hadn't even rated a 'hi'. "She's fine...and obviously she plans on being back or she would have said something."

Ty, who had a stack of painstakingly written notes (Maggie, i miss yu. do yu mis me? Love, Ty) that he'd spent a large portion of the trip laboring over, said, "But she didn't even say she misses us."

Jon swung him to his shoulders. "That goes without saying, Ty. Of course she misses you!"

* "The Air Force recognizes integrity first, service before self, and excellence as its core values. These are values every member must believe in, and more importantly, must live by." Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force Eric W. Benken .


	4. Accepting Reality

And she did. She missed all of them. Which in the end was why, still torn and uncertain, she came back to the cabin on the lake. But now, when she walked along the shore she didn't fear she was dissolving into the evening mists. She had both the boys and Daniel to keep her from scattering in the wind.

She'd found Daniel in Chicago though she hadn't known she'd lost him and she hadn't gone looking for him. She'd never let more than a month go by without calling him, reassuring herself that he was still there. But, he hadn't been. Not her Daniel anyway. The angry, bitter man striking out at her over the phone had not been the friend she'd depended on for all those years. But, he was back now.

Until her time in Chicago, they'd both been shutting themselves off, denying their grief, refusing to mourn for Jack and everyone else they'd lost in fear that by doing so they'd be letting them go. But, finally, they had come together and mourned their losses. They'd wept and railed and laughed and remembered. And when she called him now, while she waited for him to pick up, her insides no longer clenched in suffocating fear that the phone would go on ringing forever.

"Maggie's happier now," David told Jon one evening while they cleaned up the galley.

"Is she?" Jon asked. The boys were once again spending their afternoons with her now that she had returned. He himself had yet to run into her, but the boys mentioned her several times a day.

"Well, maybe happy's not the word for it, but she's not as sad anyway."

Jon paused in his work. "That's good, Son," he said.

"Yeah, she smiles and laughs now."

"I didn't notice that she had a problem with that before," Jon told him. The first time he'd met her he'd recognized the grief she carried with her. He'd had too long of an acquaintance with it himself to not. But, still she'd managed to grin at all the right places and keep the boys laughing the afternoon she'd been aboard. He hadn't expected them to see the sorrow behind her smile.

The boy frowned trying to explain a difference he saw but couldn't explain, "I mean she almost means it now. When she smiles? It almost looks like it's real."

"Maybe she's in love," Jon said. The boys had not relented in their matchmaking, and he did what he could to discourage them so they wouldn't be disappointed when their efforts failed.

"No," David said but whether because he didn't believe it or because he didn't want to believe it Jon couldn't tell. "That guy, that Daniel, she went to visit...she's says he's just a friend. Just an old friend."

"Sometimes friends fall in love, David. She left sad and came back happy...sounds like it could be love to me. What does she have to say about him? Did they used to work together or something?"

David frowned again and shrugged, "She doesn't say. I don't think she likes us to ask about stuff like that. She only likes to talk about us, what we're doing or where we've been. I don't like to ask her, because..." He glanced up at his dad and let the thought go because he didn't want to admit that when they pushed her he was pretty sure Maggie's answers were always lies.

"Well, then don't. She doesn't have to answer to us, remember?" Reminding the boys of that fact was becoming an automatic response: 'Pick up your socks.' 'Quit swinging that fishing hook around before you take out someone's eye.' 'Not until you've eaten supper.' 'Get down from there before you fall and kill yourself.' 'Maggie's a grown woman and if she wanted you to know whatever it is this time, she'd tell you.' But, he was beginning to wonder if he shouldn't demand some answers from her. He was trusting her with his sons-if whatever she was holding back from them blew up in their faces...

No matter how uncomfortable he felt with his obviously ridiculous interest in her, he needed to get to know her better. Make sure she wasn't going to hurt them. They'd already gone through the pain of losing Jamie; they didn't need Maggie to break their hearts all over again.

JSJSJSJSJSJS

The boys relayed his invitation to her the next morning. "You'll come won't you, Maggie?" they begged, and though she'd known seeing him again was inevitable, she still hesitated before agreeing that yes, she would go on a hiking expedition with them. It would be the right thing to do; it would be her good by.

She'd cried in Daniel's arms, grieving for Jack, and at the time, she had thought she was coming to terms with his death. But she hadn't. She still woke from her dreams desperate to get back to him, desperate to fight time itself for him. And to be honest, she knew now she was unwilling to let that go...till death do us part the wedding vows read. Well, death could just forget that. She would love Jack O'Neill as long as she lived regardless of the distance that separated them. She would never willingly let the bond that held them together unravel. She would have to be wiped from time itself before she would ever quit searching for a chance to save him.

Not just Jack, but that world she'd been forced to leave behind...

So. Where did that leave this world in which she lived? There were times when she thought it didn't matter. Everyone on Earth in this time stream was living on borrowed time, waiting for Baal to quit stalling and get around to delivering the deathblow. So eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die. But that didn't leave much room for integrity and service before self, and whether she was Samantha Carter, Colonel, United States Air Force or Maggie Clark, lost soul and friend of little boys, she couldn't change who she was-integrity and service mattered, living well mattered.

Living mattered. It wasn't enough just to keep breathing. She needed to more than just exist. In the days since she'd come back to the town, she'd made a decision. Baal was coming. If she couldn't go back in time and save the world she knew; she would do what she could to save this one.

Jack had called her a natural resource if not a national treasure, but so far she hadn't proven to be anything here but a national burden. That however was going to have to change...they might not want her help but somehow or another she was going to have to make them recognize they needed it. Okay, she'd keep her hands off the StarGate, but what about the Ancient weapons in Antarctica? She could be working on developing an alternate power source so they'd have something to fight back with when Baal returned. And there were other options, other weapons and defenses she could be working on. If the government refused her offer to help...well, there was the private sector. There'd be a way to do something besides waiting around hoping to disappear.

Either way, she wouldn't be staying in the backwoods of Minnesota-there was a limit to how much you could accomplish via the Internet. The move here had been good for her, but it was time to move on.

And not just for her. Summer would be drawing to a close with school starting in just a few weeks. It was time to tell the boys good by. They'd soon be off on the year's last boating expedition before leaving for the winter. They would have only a few more afternoons to waste on entertaining her anyway.

Before she'd fled to Chicago, before she'd started living again...she'd thought-well, she hated to admit even to herself what she'd thought would become of her when they left the boat, the town, and her for the winter. They'd anchored her to this life, kept her from disappearing, and she had thought once they left for the fall, once their happy voices weren't calling to her, once their laughter wasn't ringing out around her, once their small hands weren't holding her together...she had thought that would be it, she would vanish into the vast nothingness of time and be lost forever. But that wasn't going to happen now. They could get back to their happy, busy little boy lives; they'd sacrificed enough of their summer for her already.

And Jon? Better to leave it, to not give anything time to develop between them. Walk away, keep the distance. She loved him. She'd accepted that fact. Not understood it but accepted it. Did she love him because he was so very much like Jack, and regardless of what sort of man he'd been, she couldn't have helped but love him? Or did she love him because he was so very much not like Jack leaving her free to love him for the kind, good-hearted family man he was? She really couldn't say.

But it did not matter. She loved him, but she would be saying good by to him as well. It wouldn't be that difficult; she'd loved Jack for years before she'd been unable to leave it in the room. And that had been when they'd been thrown together in extreme conditions every other week. When the final good by could have come every time they walked through the Gate. And when she'd been forced to smile and say good by time after time. This would be one quick good by and hopefully, if he'd allow it, an occasional hello when she called to check on the boys.

JSJSJSJSJSJS

The day had started out bright and clear; a perfect day for a hike. But, the Suburban decided it wasn't such a great day for a drive before they'd quite reached the trailhead. He coasted to a stop on the side of the road, and they all scrambled out to frown under the hood with him.

"Can you fix it, Daddy?" Zech asked rubbing a smudge of grease onto his nose.

Looking up the road, Travis suggested, "We're almost there. We could leave it and walk. Fix it when we get back."

Jon, scowling at the vehicle's inner workings, grunted a nonanswer to them both.

Maggie edged her head farther under the hood and inspected the problem. "Looks easy enough to fix," she said.

"Ya think?" Jon retorted without glancing up at her.

"Sure. Shouldn't take more than a few minutes if you've got the tools here somewhere."

"I'll get 'em," David volunteered and ran after the toolbox, and Jon muttered, "If you say so." He watched her rummage through his tools and make her selections before he decided she wasn't just pulling his leg. With a grin, she held up the tools for his inspection, and he was struck with the knowledge he'd just gotten a glimpse of a Maggie Clark he'd not yet met. With it came a sudden and intense desire to know her more, to keep a smile always on her face.

"Ok, Travis," he said, "you can take the boys on up to the trail, but wait for us there...we'll be along one way or another." By the time he'd helped the boys sort out their packs and sent them on their way, she was almost finished.

"Know what you're doing?" he asked sticking his head under the hood with her.

She laughed and answered, "Turn it over, will you? I think that got it." The Suburban purred back to life in agreement, and he dug around in the back to find an old tee-shirt one of the boys had dropped sometime or another. It was past saving and he handed it to her so she could wipe the grease off of her hands.

"So, when you're not the mysterious lady of the lake, you're a mechanic?" he asked, and was rewarded with another smile.

"Something like. In another life," she said handing him his rag and moving off to toss the toolbox into the back.

"By the way, thanks...you know Wally's can always use a good mechanic-if you're interested."

"I'll keep that in mind," she said.

As they climbed into the vehicle he looked her way and said, "I...uh...well, I guess I was kind of wondering-not really my business, but with you spending so much time with the boys...just what are you doing here?"

"Fair enough," she said giving him a small, pinched smile. "I can see why you might want to know...I'm uh..." she turned away then and looked out her side window before continuing, "I just needed the change. My husband died...over a year ago now...this seemed like a good place to disappear for awhile, you know?"

"Actually, yeah, I do."

"Is that why you spend the summers out in that boat?"

"No. I live on the boat. I disappear in the city." He frowned over at her but she was still looking out the window. "So, what happened?"

"Uh...he uh...he died...in the line of duty."

"Cop?"

"Armed Forces."

"Iraq?"

"No."

He waited a beat but that was all he was going to get. "I'm sorry."

She looked at him then with an expression he couldn't read. It was almost like he'd said something ludicrous in expressing his sympathy over her loss, and he wondered if she'd realized that he was attracted to her. After an awkward moment she said, "You're very much like him."

"Oh," he said trying to lighten the mood. "He was remarkably handsome then?"

"Extraordinarily."

"And exceptionally witty."

"Oh yeah."

"Smart."

"Not that he'd admit to."

"Oh, well, see, we're not that much alike then," he said. He failed to see how his words brought tears to her eyes because by then he was pulling into the graveled parking lot and able to see that his sons were climbing the rock cliff at its back. He stuck his head out his window and hollered, "Get down from there, before you fall and kill yourselves!" By the time, he looked back over at her she was already climbing out the door and pulling on her own pack.

JSJSJSJSJSJS

She knew before she had finished speaking that she had miscalculated badly in assuming the boys would take her leaving in stride.

David stood stricken glaring at her in anger and disbelief. Josh was shaking his head and glaring as well. The younger boys weren't as angry though they were just as upset; Zech and Ty were sobbing in Jon's arms refusing to even look at her.

Only Bryan appeared unfazed by her announcement. And that, she knew, was only because he hadn't heard. He'd been listening to the clanging of swords and the roars of dragons in his mind instead of her. But, slowly he became aware he'd missed something. "What?" he asked looking around in puzzlement and growing concerned. "What did Maggie say?"

It was Travis who answered, "She's leaving us...moving away." Maggie was surprised at his answer and at the bitterness in his voice. The boys-she should have seen that coming. How she could have been so blind as to not realize that they loved her as much as she loved them? How had that happened? They'd never known her, not really. Just the shadow, just Maggie who didn't even exist.

But Travis? What 'us' had he experienced? A few afternoons on the shore, the one in the boat...how could he possibly sound as though she was personally deserting him?

"I'm sorry," she said to all of them. "I...I didn't think you'd care so much...summer's almost over. You'll be leaving anyway-"

David came to life with a wounded cry of outrage, "But you were supposed to come with us! You were supposed to marry Dad and come with us!"

"Oh, David," she said softly. "That wasn't going to happen."

"Why not?"

She shook her head mutely and looked to Jon for help, but he was as angry as his sons. She was the one who'd made this mess and she could very well dig her own way out.

"Why not?" David demanded again.

"We're from totally different worlds," she said.

"You don't have to be! You would like our life, Maggie. You would. The boat and the house and everything..."

"It's a very nice life, honey. A good life...but...I'm sorry, David." She held out her arms, and he threw himself against her and sobbed.

"Please," he pleaded. "He's perfect for you, Maggie-he'd make you happy."

"I know, I know," she said, rocking him and crying herself. Jon wondered if she realized what she'd said. He knew she hadn't meant it the way it sounded. It had been just a sympathetic comment to let David know she understood his sorrow and turmoil. It had not been an agreement that he was perfect for her, that he was the one capable of making her happy.

Still he looked around at the devastated faces of his sons and knew they reflected his own feelings. She was going to leave the lake and go back to whatever it was she'd done before she'd come to their world. And he had to admit to himself that that was as unacceptable to him as it was the boys.

"Travis, take the boys up the trail...feed them lunch and wait for us at the spring," he said.

"Yes, Sir," Travis said. He reluctantly began herding his little brothers up the path. David clung to Maggie and shook his head violently when called.

"Let him stay," Jon said with a frown, and the others went on their way.

She wet her lips and swallowed down tears to look over at him and say, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to ruin your hike...I..." she shrugged her inability to excuse her thoughtlessness.

He pursed his lips and shook his head. "Well, you can't change what's already done," he said.

"No," she said with a wavering breath. "I can't."

"Answer me something...I'm getting up there you know? My hearing-could be going, but did I just hear you tell David you knew I was perfect for you? That I could make you happy?"

She shook her head helplessly while David pulled away from her embrace to look from his father to her. "Isn't that what you heard, son?" Jon asked.

"Yes," David said though he'd been crying so hard that Jon doubted he really had.

Jon stepped over to stand over them. He looked down at her and said, "Well?"

There were a multitude of answers that she could have given that would have denied what he was implying. One of them, any of them was what he expected her to eventually say. Because for all he now knew his own feelings for her were stronger than he'd even suspected, she had never given him cause to think she shared them.

He wasn't sure what he was doing having this conversation. He should have packed up the boys and taken them home, fed them hot dogs and ice cream, let them slam doors and kick bulkheads, and cry and get it over with. He should have let her have it for putting them all through this, instead he stood over her waiting for her to deny his words with a joke, a snort of derision, or at least an apologetic 'sorry'.

He was not prepared when instead of a rebuttal he got an affirmation of sorts. "You don't even know me," she said almost in a whisper.

"Introduce me then," he said and though he hadn't meant it to come out they both could heard the need in his voice.

She came to her feet in an anguished rush as though she could flee down the trail and leave him and his demands behind. She didn't though. She stood there, shaking her head. "I can't!" she cried. "Not now and not ten years down the road. Never! There are things I'll never be able to tell you. Everywhere you look there will only be silence and lies...can you live like that? Can you let the boys live like that?"

It was David who answered for him, "We don't need to know those things, Maggie...we just need you."

She began to shake her head, open her mouth to deny it, but Jon didn't let her. He pulled her into his arms and kissing her found that for all he'd believed she could never love him...she did. She was still crying and tasted of salt and tears. "I love you, Maggie," he said when he pulled back to look at her.

"That's the problem," she said quietly with an uneasy glance at David, "I'm not Maggie." He drew in a deep breath and closed his eyes against her words. He'd known she had secrets. Who didn't? No one wanted strangers discussing their life story over coffee at the café. That didn't mean they had anything to hide. But living under an assumed name? That was another ball game.

The silence and lies she'd referred to a moment before...he'd thought, he'd assumed they were just the holes left behind from a grief and sorrow she didn't believe she'd ever be able to share with him. There were memories of Jamie he held so close that even now five years down the road he'd never shared them with her sons...those were the silences and lies he could live with, could let his sons live with.

But, this? He felt suddenly thrown into another reality, like a character on TV. The world he'd always known wavered and threatened to disappear. He was no longer in safe and familiar waters but flailing about in unknown and dangerous deeps.

"David, catch up with your brothers. Now."

"Dad?"

"Go."

"Yes, Sir."

"You know, I'm just a guy who works in a lumber mill to put food on the table and hopes he can raise his sons to be as happy with their lives as I've been with mine...I don't have any idea how to respond to what you just said. Help me out here."

She'd taken the time it took David to reluctantly start up the trail to get some control over herself so that she met his eyes with a resigned calm. "There isn't a way to respond to it, Jon. That's the point. Whatever you think you feel for me-"

"I'm not Travis, Mag-uh...whatever. I'm not fifteen; I know what I feel for you. It's this other thing we're talking about that has me confused."

She had the grace to blush, and he wondered at the incongruity of her life of lies and secrets and the openness of her being. There was nothing hidden or secretive in who she was, the lies were all superficial. And he thought if he had to explain why he wasn't running up that trail to gather the boys and get them as far away from her as he could that would be the only defense he had to offer. He trusted her. Deep down where it mattered, he trusted her.

"We're not talking about that other thing," she said. "Either of them for that matter. I know I made a mess out of it so far, but I'll bow out of all your lives as quietly and as painlessly as I can. I-"

"Whoa! You may not be talking, but I'm not done here. Just let me think a minute. You...you, uh...at no point did whatever we aren't talking about put my sons in danger?"

"No. No, of course not. It's not that sort of a...thing."

He breathed a sigh of relief at that and gave her a half grin. "I didn't think so."

"I know I botched it today, but I do love them...they're great kids. I would never put them in that sort of jeopardy."

"I believe you," he said. "Now about this thing...are you, uh...a fugitive?"

"No."

"So?"

"Jon, please. Fishing isn't going to get you anywhere. John Walsh isn't going to run my story on America's Most Wanted next week. I was once told I might find myself on the cover of the _Enquirer_ one day but then who's safe from that? I'm going to play by the rules. You don't have to worry that I'm going to disillusion your boys...I'm just a lady who stayed at the lake one summer and enjoyed their company, they won't ever need to know anything else."

Jon put a hand over his forehead and pinched the bridge of his nose. He felt sick as though his world was still spinning out of control. He knew he should listen to her, let her go, let her always be in the boys' memories exactly what she said.

But, of course, she was already much more than that to them. She hadn't understood how much they loved her before she'd put her foot in it today, and she still didn't.

"You're more than that to them already. A lot more than that. They love you. One way or another I don't think they are going to accept you bowing out of their lives," he said, catching her eye and refusing to let her drop her gaze. "Me either. I love you, too-whoever you are. And I may not have kissed that many women, but you can't tell me you don't love me...not now."

"All right. That's one lie I won't tell you." She'd lost by then the forced calm that had carried her through the conversation up to this point, and he flinched at the raw pain in her eyes and voice and knew regardless of his unanswered questions, regardless of all the niggling fears and doubts eating into his guts he could live with her lies if that meant living with that one single truth.

He reached out, pulled her to him, and said, "Come here." She let him pull her against him, but she was still shaking her head. "Jon, I can't do this...it's not only the lies. I still love him, and I can't let him go."

"Your husband?" he asked gently, and she nodded her head against him.

"He's really dead, isn't he?" he wanted to ask just to be sure, but he couldn't. 'Everywhere you look there will only be silence and lies...can you live like that?' she'd asked, and the only way he would ever convince her he could was by swallowing down his distrust.

Deceit was not in her makeup, and he would chase her away if he was constantly pushing her, constantly demanding reassurances she'd already told him he couldn't trust, constantly forcing her to voice the lies.

Chasing her away was the last thing he intended to do, so instead he told her earnestly, "He's gone. He's not here. But I am!"


	5. Present Realities

"I wouldn't have thought you'd get a signal here," Jon said when her cell rang as they were almost back to the trailhead. He reached over and carefully took Ty from her so she could answer. The little boy, as worn out as much by the emotional upheaval of the day as he was from the hike itself, didn't stir during the transfer.

Jon took the moment of closeness to kiss Maggie's dusty cheek. Travis and Josh who'd both glanced back when her phone rang caught him at it. Josh rolled his eyes and wrinkled his nose in disgust before turning to watch where he was going, but much to Jon's surprise, Travis gave him a satisfied grin. Well, that was one thing that was going to work out much simpler than he would have expected. Maybe the only thing the rate things were going.

"Off and on," Maggie said in answer to him before saying, "Hello," to whoever was on the other end of the call.

"So, how was the hike?" a man's voice came just loudly enough that Jon had no difficulty in hearing him.

She glanced shyly over at Jon before saying, "Umm...it had its moments-"

The voice broke in before she could finish, "Good, good. Listen, Sam-"

Now the look she threw Jon was not shy but alarmed. He fought to not let the shock that 'Sam' sent through him show. "I love you whoever you are," he'd promised not three hours before and he didn't want to know, God help him, he did not want to know who she was when she wasn't Maggie Clark.

"Daniel," she said lowly and urgently, the warning as clear as the mountain air they were breathing.

But for all that, the voice-Daniel, kept right on talking as though she hadn't said a thing, "About the weapons platform in Antarctica. If you're really going to get it up, you're going to need a working ZPM, right?"

"Daniel-"

"Maybe, we have one." And whatever a ZPM was, the possibility of having one was enough to make her forget to worry about what Jon could or could not hear.

"What do you mean? Where?"

"Giza...it would still be there, right? Baal didn't go back far enough to stop them from burying it 5,000 years ago. I've searched the journals, no one's unearthed it yet-the dig that found it, never happened here."

Bryan, Zech, and Alex, flying down the path behind them playing who knew what, all but ran into her where she stood stock still in the middle of the path. They parted around her and ran on past but her mind was on other things and she didn't notice them. "Of course. It should be there...why didn't we think of that before? We'll have to retrieve it somehow-"

"Right, I figured we could sic the geek on it...goodness knows they'll never give me the clearance to go. I'm sure he'd jump at the chance for a paid dig."

Jon couldn't help watching her face. It was alive with an interest and intensity he'd never seen in her before-not even up on the trail. He felt a twinge of jealousy that whatever they were discussing could enliven her in a way he couldn't.

"What kind of money would it take, Daniel?" she asked. "If we decide to handle this on our own and bypass the-" whatever she had been going to end with was cut off when she looked up and caught him looking at her. "I'll call you back in an hour or two," she said and broke the connection before Daniel could protest.

What was happening between them was so new and fragile that he knew it could end right here. It was all up to him. Prove to her that her secrets-whatever they were-were safe from him or tell her 'sorry whatever you're involved in it's too much for me'. His life had always been simple, uncomplicated...just the way he liked it. What was he doing standing here in love with a woman whose life was as convoluted as the tributary systems feeding the Great Lakes?

"I didn't hear anything," he told her. "Not a thing."

JSJSJSJSJSJSJSJSJSJ

Great. Three hours. Three hours and she was already involving him in the mess that was her life. He'd heard everything she was sure regardless of his denial. And how long could he keep that up? How long could he swallow down the need to know? How long could he pretend that it would be possible for them to lead a normal, everyday life? What did he think she was? A government agent? A spy? He might before have taken her for someone in the Witness Protection Program or maybe an abused spouse on the run, but now? She and Daniel had pretty much laid that to rest, and it had only been three hours since she'd admitted she loved him.

She should never have answered the phone, should have let it go to voice mail. Certainly the moment Daniel went off with that particular tone in his voice, she should have broken the connection and called him back later. He'd spent all those years pitching his ideas to Jack and learning to bulldoze his way past every interruption, denial, or distraction until he'd gotten what needed said said...she should have known she'd never stop him until he was done.

A whole year of not saying anything likely to alert their handlers just in case their calls were being monitored, and the one time someone really had been listening...what a mess.

And she'd been no better getting caught up in the conversation with Jon so close he couldn't have helped but to hear every word and at least one or two of the boys bound to be in hearing distance as well. And she'd let herself start to believe-hope anyway, that somehow there would be a way to mesh a life with Jon and the boys with the life she'd only just determined to begin again.

Who had she been kidding? Three hours...not quite that even.

She couldn't live a lie and pursue any personal relationship...even if her plans were compatible with the life he and the boys lived.

She had calls in requesting meetings with General Landry, the Chief of Staff, three senators she hoped weren't that changed from the men she'd known, and President Hayes. She had no intention of hanging out in the Land of Sky Blue Waters waiting for the end to come. Just where did she think she was going to fit a family into that? Was she going to fly back from McMurdo for Travis' hockey games or the boys' parent-teacher conferences?

She'd missed every school function Cassy had ever invited her to, every one of them: the plays, the open houses, the games, the debates. She'd even missed her graduation. She'd been able to explain to Cassy where she'd been, why she hadn't made it, but even so she knew Cassy had been hurt every time she hadn't shown up. The boys wouldn't even have the truth to help them get over the disappointments, only lies.

He must have read it in her eyes. Before she could open her mouth to tell him she couldn't go on with this, he said, "We'll make this work...we will."

It was the first time she'd heard the hard, unbreakable will of Jack O'Neill in him, and against her better judgment she let his certainty convince her there had to be a way to work things out.

JSJSJSJSJSJSJSJSJJSJS

"I'll call you back in an hour or two," she'd said, and Jon had understood then this was how it was always going to be. She wouldn't be coming out to the boat with them after all, wouldn't be joining him on the deck after the boys were bathed and tucked into their bunks to talk about what was happening between them. She'd be holing up in her cabin discussing things she couldn't or wouldn't share with him. And every plan they ever made from now on would be just as easily forgotten and discarded when the phone rang.

Jamie had been born on the boat, and she'd spent every summer of her life on the water. She'd grown up telling her parents she was going to marry a man who'd want nothing more from life than to spend summers on the boat with her and to raise a passel (whatever that was) of kids. Somehow she'd decided that day in his grandfather's garage when they were both still kids themselves that he was the one. Although it had taken her some time to convince him, she'd been right. He'd put away his schoolboy dreams of flying in the Air Force and he'd never looked back.

Life on the boat with her and the boys...they'd been free with no demands on them at all except those the water itself placed. Following where the water led them for days or weeks, some years without even a rough idea of how long they'd be out or how far they'd go.

It was a life he loved, and one in which Maggie would never be at home. One she couldn't live. She'd had this summer of sleeping late, sitting on the rocks watching the clouds go by, laughing with his sons, and doing nothing. But it had been just that...a summer of doing nothing, and he could see, now that it was drawing to a close, that it was the life she would leave behind without a backwards glance.

She and he were from different worlds. He looked at her looking at him and knew she was thinking the same thing. Only she was prepared to let it go at that. If he let her, she would before they reached the cabin find an easy way to tell him, "Thanks, it was a nice idea, but..." And maybe he should let her.

"Can you live with that? Can you let the boys live with that?" she'd asked and he'd thought he could. But there was more to 'that' then he'd understood at the time and he thought there might be a lot more of it before this was done.

'Sam' the voice had called her: 'Sam' a nickname for a woman who was supposed to be dead and who just happened to be a dead ringer for her. Oh yeah, did he want his sons involved with something like that?

'Baal didn't go back far enough to stop them from burying it 5,000 years ago. I've searched the journals, no one's unearthed it yet-the dig that found it, never happened here.' What kind of insanity was she involved in and could she really keep it from touching his sons?

Maybe he should walk away and let her go. Probably he should walk away and let her go. Undoubtedly he should. If he hadn't just decided up there on the trail that he wasn't willing to lose what he saw in her, he might have done it. If the boys weren't floating high with excitement and unbridled enthusiasm believing she wasn't going to be just someone they met on the lake one summer; if he hadn't just promised her the world and made her believe he could give it to her, he might have walked away and let her go.

But...he loved her and the boys loved her and he couldn't make himself believe for one moment she was the type of person who could ever bring harm to him or his family. Beneath the lies, beneath the deceits and secrets and mysteries, he knew he could trust her.

More than that he just knew this was right. They belonged together wherever that led them.

"We'll make this work...we will," he promised and willed her to trust him as much as he trusted her. "We'll talk tomorrow, and we'll figure out a way to make this work. For us and for the boys."

JSJSJSJSJSJSJ

He'd promised her the gaping big hole of her secret past would not be a problem for them, but, of course, it was. How could it not be?

It was the youngest boys, living with their own black holes where the memories of their mother would have been if she'd lived long enough for them to remember her, that found Maggie's missing past the hardest to deal with.

Ty, sad and concerned after helping to unpack her few belongings and find places for them in the house: "Where are your pictures? The ones when you were a little girl? Where are the pictures you drew for your mom? Where are your report cards and the notes the teacher sent home saying you were a star pupil?"

She drew him onto her lap and answered him truthfully, "They were lost in time."

Bryan, fingering her driver's license as they drove to the Highway Department to apply for a new one: "You look so sad."

"Everyone looks sad or grumpy or just plain dumb on their license," Jon answered.

"But you were sad, weren't you, Maggie? Because he died? Your husband."

"Yes, I was sad."

"What was his name?"

She bit her lip, glanced at Jon, and answered the question with just the one word, "Jack."

"Jack what?"

"Everyone knows that," Josh said from the back, "Jack Clark, of course." Though he left off the 'dummy' not wanting to draw his father's disapproving glare, it was plainly implied and he got the look anyway through the rearview mirror.

"Then what was your name before?" Bryan persisted after scowling over the seat at his brother.

There was that pause Jon had already learned to hate. That tightening of her eyes, the quick swallow as though she had to fight down the truth before she could force out the lie. He saved her from having to say whatever lie was waiting to be spoken because he'd come to realize she hated saying them as much as he hated hearing them, "Hey, who cares? The important thing is it's O'Neill now."

Zech, pensively standing with his hands clasped behind him looking at the family pictures on the living room wall: "How will you remember him without any pictures?"

She looked up from sorting the mound of socks spilling over the couch and onto the floor and frowned, "Remember who?"

"Him. Jack. How will you remember what he looked like without any pictures?"

She looked at Jon before she answered, "I'll remember him."

Jon grimaced in misunderstanding. Later when Zech had wandered off and it was just the two of them still forging their way through the socks, he said, "I'm sorry. I never even gave it a thought."

"What?"

"The pictures," he said nodding his head at the wall where half a dozen Jamies smiled down at them. "I'll take them down."

"They're fine. They don't bother me, and the boys need them."

"You sure?" he asked even though by then he knew he was as likely to get a lie as the truth when he asked her a question.

"Of course, besides I'd miss them if you took them down, especially the one with you in a goatee," she said laughing. He threw a handful of socks in her direction.

Alex, running a hand over the eagles on her shoulders as she hugged him one last time before boarding the plane that would take her on the first leg of her trip to McMurdo: "Six months is a long time."

"I know."

"What if...what if you forget us?"

"I'm not going to forget you. We'll call and email and write. And I'll be coming home as often as I can to see you. You're pretty memorable-I'm sure I won't forget you in a month or six weeks or even sixty years."

"What if you lose us?"

"What do you mean, Honey?"

"I mean...you don't have any of your stuff from before you came to the lake. You went to the lake without it because you couldn't take it with you, just like you can't take us with you to McMurdo. But you must have forgotten where you left it because you don't have it anymore-you lost it!"

"Oh, Alex," she said pulling him close. "Is that what you think happened? Honey, the stuff I had before didn't matter. It was just stuff. But you matter. You and your dad and your brothers. You all matter, very, very much. I'm not going to forget you or lose you...and you can call me every night just to make sure I don't."

Jon looked on feeling guilty because she would have taken them if he would have agreed to it.

"You could come you know? Pack up the boys and come with me," she'd said over her half-packed bags spread out on the bed. "It would be an incredible experience for the boys. McMurdo Station isn't that far from the base, and it's equipped to house a good number of civilians-"

He'd interrupted her with the words, "Travis is fifteen," as though they explained everything because to him they did. She'd only looked puzzled. He had frowned at her. So far she had almost instinctively navigated the rough waters of melding their new life together without tearing apart the boys' fragile hold on the life they'd always known. But, this was more like on the mountain when she'd thoughtlessly ripped their hearts up saying she was leaving them. The memory of that made his voice hard as he said, "He's gone to school with the same kids all of his life-how can you expect me to take him away from that at his age?"

"Oh," she said. "I...no, of course, you can't do that."

"Even you, Maggie, were fifteen once. You can't tell me you forgot how important belonging is at that age," he pushed on because he wanted the same thing she did and knowing it wasn't happening hurt.

But the pain he'd felt had been there in his voice, and it had earned him a very rare glimpse into her past. "I'm sorry, Jon. I haven't forgotten, but..." a pause and a sigh while she weighed the consequences of releasing what little information she was about to impart, "my father was military. We moved every year or two." And that was all he got, and what it could possibly have revealed to him of what she didn't want him to know was just one more of the fathomless mysteries loving Maggie entailed.

And it hadn't changed the fact she would be reporting to Antarctica alone for her six month tour of duty, while he and the boys stayed behind praying she didn't forget them while she was gone.

JSJSJSJSJSJSJ

Landry was no Hammond. If he had been her only option, she and Daniel would have been robbing banks to fund the dig near Giza. Fortunately, he wasn't her superior officer, and she was not obligated to stick with the chain of command. Landry could sputter and threaten all he wanted but she could (and did) with the right hints and innuendos interest Senator Todd without breaking any of the fine print on that agreement she'd signed. He was as forceful as she had hoped, and as well connected. The President may not have wanted to take her calls, but the Senator ensured he did.

The meetings lasted three days. They'd flown Daniel in after the first, and a reluctant Cam the next. Before it was over, she'd stood before the Red, White, and Blue and once again pledged her allegiance to the Constitution and all that it entailed. She'd put back on the uniform of an Air Force officer and the President himself had awkwardly pinned the eagles onto her shoulders. He'd winked when she'd saluted but her deadly earnestness had wiped the grin from his face.

She'd been relieved to learn the Gate had already been recovered though they were all three told they would not be involved with the StarGate Program in any way, shape, or form. No one here was yet ready to believe they wouldn't make a run for it giving half a chance...she'd looked over the table at Daniel and his indignant fury had assured her they were right there. He'd looked back and she'd met his gaze without any hesitation or wavering. And what that meant to the man and boys waiting for her back in Minnesota, she had not wanted to consider.

"Come on!" Daniel had exclaimed. "She wrote the book on the StarGate! You'll be setting yourselves back fifteen years if not more if you don't let her in on getting it up and running." His argument had fallen on deaf ears. Cam had thrown down a gauntlet demanding they be allowed input in the Program if nothing more, but he'd had to back down when it became apparent it was the one thing they were not getting.

Though she itched to get the Gate up and running with an urgency this world could not seem to comprehend, she left D.C. satisfied with how things had progressed. Government men were already liaising with the Daniel Jackson in Egypt for the dig to retrieve the ZPM, and a team was being assembled to begin uncovering the weapons platform in Antarctica. They'd managed to get far more than she had dared hope, and for the first time in over a year she felt useful and productive.

She talked Daniel into flying home with her. She needed the moral support. Facing the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff was nothing compared to facing what awaited her back in Minnesota. It was pointless for her to pretend she could fit Jon and the boys into her life and work especially while having to keep everything else of any importance to her a secret from them.

She'd promised Jon they'd talk about it when she returned from her meetings...but what was there to talk about? She couldn't imagine he'd uproot the boys and follow her to McMurdo for the months it would take to dig out the weapons platform and get it up and running. And after that who even knew where she'd end up...wherever they could find or set up a lab equipped and capable of supporting her research.

So what did that leave them? An occasional weekend's leave stolen from the research, most of it eaten up by travel time. Censored phone calls and emails. Disappointment, frustration and growing resentment until it all blew up in anger and hostility. She'd take the happiness she'd heard and seen on that boat and destroy it just as Baal had her world.

She'd thought about not going back, disappearing from their lives just as she'd always expected she would one day disappear from this world. But...living with integrity and all that didn't make that a viable option even if she could have found it within herself to do it.

She'd face him, say that good by she'd intended to say on the day of the hike to the boys and the one she'd tried to avoid having to say to him, pack her bags, and go.

She hadn't survived her time in the Gulf or the years at the SGC without learning that she could do what had to be done (whatever that was at the time) regardless of how frightening the situation was. And she hadn't served all those missions with Colonel Jack O'Neill without learning that doing what had to be done was sometimes much more than just facing pain or death...sometimes that would have been preferable to what was required.

No, sometimes doing what had to be done meant doing what you hated, becoming what you hated even. And that's why she talked Daniel into coming. When she faltered in breaking those little boys' hearts, when she wavered before Jon's determination just like she always had Jack's, when she couldn't say what needed said to protect that family from the harm she'd do if she stayed-she'd need Daniel to remind her why she was acting in such a despicable and reprehensible way.

It didn't work the way she'd planned, of course. The airstrip was in a town roughly fifty miles away, and Jon had insisted he and the boys would come and pick them up (the Senator having provided her outgoing transportation, her car was still parked beside her cabin). Fifty miles wasn't far, but it was far enough for Daniel to switch sides. By the time they'd rattled their way home in the battered fifteen passenger van Jon had borrowed from a local church to fit them all in, he had seen enough to know he wasn't going to help her in her determined rush to self-destruction.

"You can't do it, Sam," he told her earnestly while they took care of a few things in the cabin. They were supposed to be joining the family for supper on the boat, and the boys had gone ahead to get things started while their dad dropped off the van. Daniel had known he wouldn't have much time to talk to her on his own, but he had had even less time than he realized. Jon was already standing on her step with his hand raised to knock on her door.

He froze when he heard that name again and though he didn't mean to eavesdrop it was several moments before he thawed enough to stop himself.

"You know I have to-I can't devote the time I need to into the weapons project and spend any time with them. It wouldn't be fair to them..."

"Is that really why you're determined to walk away? For them?"

"Of course, it is, Daniel..."

"Are you sure you're not just running away? Come on, Sam...you're right, he's not Jack. But those boys? Why didn't you tell me they were so...so Jack?" Now what in the world was that supposed to mean?

There was an uncomfortable and long silence stretching out after that, and it was Daniel himself that broke it, "Guess it stands to reason doesn't it?" Certainly not. How could his son's be like her dead husband? "Jack was in a lot of ways just an overgrown kid himself..." Okay, he could accept that-sort of. "...but that's not what we're talking about. And I shouldn't have brought it up-it's just...well, just self-projecting I guess. You should have warned me-I miss him too you know."

"Oh, Daniel. I know. I'm sorry."

"Yeah, well you can make it up to me later, right now, before we get overrun again, I've got to tell you, I think you're wrong here. They love you-all of them, and you love them."

"That's the whole point, Daniel. In fact, there wouldn't be a problem if they didn't. I could pop in and out of their lives like a family friend and no one would get hurt. But, this-"

"You and Jack handled a long-distance relationship just fine."

"We handled it...I'm not sure I'd say just fine. It was hard. Very hard, and we both understood why it had to be. For all I will ever be able to tell Jon, I just got bored doing nothing and found something to keep myself busy. I can't tell him Baal's coming and Armageddon is just around the corner...how long do you think he'll put up with me being gone before he's had enough? How many times do you think it will take me not being there when they need me before those little boys hate me?"

"Give them a chance-at least talk to him. He might think a weekend here and there is better than nothing...and as for the kids, he's their dad, let him decide what they can and cannot handle."

"Come on, Daniel, how can he make a decision like that when he hasn't even been briefed on any of this? We both know there's more to it than whether I'll be there with supper ready when he gets off work or the kids need help with their homework...but we can't exactly lay that out on the table, can we? I didn't bring you here to argue with me, Daniel! You're supposed to help me do what has to be done."

"I'm trying-if you'd just listen."

"It will only make it worse. Drag it out even further than I already have. I need-"

"What you need is out there in that boat!"

Jon forced himself to move and opened the door. He stepped into the room and said, "Actually, what you need is right here."

"How long...how long have you been out there?" she stammered, and Daniel breathed a 'whoops' under his breath.

"Long enough," he said taking her by the shoulders and willing her to listen to him. "Long enough to know Daniel's right. The boys and I-we'll be happy with whatever time you can give us...if that's just a day or two here and there, then that's what we'll take. We're pretty self-sufficient, you know. Whatever you can spare from whatever it is you've got to do, we can live with that."

"Can you?" she asked shaking her head.

"Yes! We can!"

"You live out there in that boat, Jon...I don't even belong in this world of yours."

"You can!" he took a deep breath and lowered his voice trying to calm them both. "You can be in our world. You're more than welcome." He tried to catch her eye but she refused to meet his gaze. Instead she looked desperately toward Daniel although she already knew by then he wasn't going to give her the backup she needed.

She pulled out of Jon's grasp and valiantly fought on alone. "If you've been listening, you know there's more to it than that...more than I can tell you. Do you realize that if they even knew we were talking about something like this, they'd be down here vetting you and the boys before morning? No, of course you don't, because you don't even know who they are! I can't join you in your world, Jon, and you do not want to join me in mine!"

She looked at him then pleading him to understand. Looking deep into her anguished eyes, he had the awful feeling that he'd lost.

His uncle had put him to work at the mill when it became obvious to everyone in the family that he wasn't headed to college and that they'd be lucky if he stayed in school long enough to get his diploma. He'd put in his time (doubles, nights, weekend shifts, and holidays whenever possible) and without it he'd never have kept the boat afloat, but he'd never had to fight for it. And though he had gone to the trouble of asking Jamie's dad if he could marry her, it had only been a formality with absolutely no doubt about the outcome: Jamie had told her dad she'd be marrying him even before she'd told him. Jamie had carried all of her pregnancies to term without any complications of note, and all their sons had born healthy and strong. The house, like the job, had come down from his uncle with such easy terms it was almost laughable: the boat from her grandfather.

In short, he'd never had to fight for anything that really mattered in his entire life. He'd never been a fighter, but then maybe he just had never needed to be. Because staring at his defeat in her eyes, he knew he was not about to give in. He wanted her, and he wasn't going to let her drive him away, no matter how desperately she pleaded.

He had nothing with which to counter her arguments because he was afraid she was right. Still he wasn't about to admit defeat. Wildly trying to formulate a plan of attack, he stalled. He pasted onto his face the most confident smile he could muster and said as jauntily as he could manage, "So just come for a visit now and then...we'd love to have you."

He might as well have punched her. She gave a small, wounded gasp and staggered back from him another step. Daniel, too, reacted with a startled exhalation as though shocked by what he'd seen and heard.

"What?" Jon asked in confusion while she put a hand to her mouth and quite obviously struggled to fight down tears. Daniel stepped over to her as though she needed him to hold her up, and Jon thought whatever he'd just done he'd lost the one ally he'd had.

"Maggie?" he asked reaching out a hand to comfort her.

She flinched away from him. "Don't," she said, but it was only a whisper and somewhere she'd lost the conviction and certainty he'd heard in her voice before. He suddenly knew that the tables had turned. Somehow he had gained the upper hand. He was determined to not lose that advantage.

"Look at me, Maggie," he commanded her. She trembled as she lifted her head to obey him. He stared into her eyes and said, "It's going to be all right." He moved to her then and put his arms around her. "It's going to be all right," he said again. "I love you, you love me...everything else will work out."

His words were blatantly untrue no matter how much he wanted to believe them. She knew better, but...

Even without Daniel's aid, she'd almost succeeded in getting away from him. Almost. Of all times, why had she made the mistake of looking at him right when he'd for just that instant become Jack? And why whenever she needed him to be mild-mannered and easy-going Jon did he speak to her with Jack's deceptively quiet but absolutely determined voice? Hadn't this already been hard enough?

Still, she might have rallied, might have gathered her wits and her strength and struggled on if not for Daniel. He'd put a hand on her shoulder and said, "You can't fight this-anytime, every time it's going to happen, no matter what you do. You can't fight it, and you don't want to. You only think you should. Give it up...stop trying to keep it from happening and start trying to make it work."

Faced with such overwhelming odds, she's had no choice but to surrender.


	6. Frozen Reality

By the time she arrived in McMurdo three weeks later, the ZPM was in shipment from Egypt, and Cam, overseeing the placement of the boring site, had already had the necessary equipment in place. Jack, with the knowledge of the Ancients overwriting his own, had been able to pinpoint the exact spot to target, but they were shooting in the dark and their best guess could literally be dozens of very expensive miles off in any direction.

She needed them to be dead on center if she didn't want to be right back in D.C. trying to keep the cash flowing. Fortunately, Daniel had joined Cam after the wedding and between his archeologist's feel for what lay buried deep beneath the surface and Cam's innate sense of direction and distance they hit pay dirt before the folks back in Washington got antsy enough to start hinting about pulling the plug.

And that's when she got busy. She'd requested several specific men and women for her scientific team. Perhaps requested wasn't the right word. She'd sent Colonel Davis out with a list of possible scientists who might have the knowledge and qualifications to work on the project. Less than half of them had proven themselves qualified: Felger was starring in a sit-com, and Haley had been kicked out of the academy and never even gotten her degree. Which meant not only was she starting the research from basically scratch, but she was also breaking in a practically new team.

It was a new and not so welcome experience for her to be the head of the program as it had been years since her fieldwork had not taken precedence and unless SG-1 had been grounded she'd only pinch-hit in the lab. Even in her brief tenure in Area 51 a year or so back, she'd been the new guy in the lab not the headman...and that had suited her fine. She would have been happier even now finding someone competent enough to oversee the work and let her delve into the areas where she thought she could accomplish the most in the shortest amount of time.

Dr. Lee had possibilities, but he along with the rest of the group was still struggling with even accepting that their wildest dreams had a basis in their present reality. For all their impressive credentials and prior accomplishments, this was one scenario they were having trouble grasping. McKay being the worst in the bunch. She'd been right not to put his name on her list. Too bad Davis rounded him up anyway.

Not that they weren't excited and qualified. The powers that be hadn't let her down...once they'd decided the job needed done, they'd gone overboard to provide her with the materials and people to do it. It was just going to take more time than she'd like to get them up to speed so she could dig into the work herself.

And every day she felt a growing urgency...Baal was coming, she could smell his rotting stench in her dreams. He'd already waited far longer than they could have hoped. One day soon, they'd wake up to his ships darkening the skies overhead. She doubled her hours in the lab and when she left it to her harassed and overworked team it was only to go to her quarters and document everything she knew about Gate technology. They didn't want her input, but she rewrote the book for them anyway...all eight hundred and twenty-three pages.

And when there wasn't the work, there were the phone calls home: 2:30 to 3:00 every afternoon while she grabbed a late lunch and the little guys back home got ready for bed the night before they bridged six time zones and the International Date Line to touch base with one another. It was the only time of the day her team could rest easy knowing she wasn't hovering over their shoulders with her hands itching to take over their keyboards.

 _"I get to start on Saturday."_

 _"That's great, Trav! I wish I could be there to see you."_

 _"Ah, it's okay. Dad will take the camera I'm sure. You can watch it when you come home. When are you coming?"_

 _"I don't know...as soon as I can get away."_

"I'm getting really good on the sax. We have a concert next Friday. Can you come?"

"I'm sorry, David."

"It's okay. Dad will probably record it and you can watch it when you come home...when are you coming?"

"I don't know...as soon as I can get away."

 _"We have to do a science project-can you help me?"_

 _"Sure. Email me what you've got in mind, and we'll talk about it."_

 _"It's not due for a month. Surely you'll be home by then and we can just-"_

 _"I don't think we should count on it, Josh-email me."_

"I miss you."

"I miss you too, Ty."

"Daddy misses you too."

"I know. I miss him too...I miss all of you."

"We want you to come home."

"I promise I'll come as soon as I can..."

 _"Do you still remember the way home?"_

 _"I sure do. And I have the map you sent right here. I'll come as soon as I can and I won't get lost-you'll see."_

 _"Is six months almost done yet?"_

 _"I'm afraid not, Sport..."_

"So, any idea when you'll make it home? The boys are piling up everything they want to show you when you come back in the living room-I'm thinking I'm going to have to build on."

"I'll try to get there before that happens."

"We'd like that. A lot. I'd like that a lot."

And then there were the emails filtering in and out of her inbox as time permitted:

 _Dear Maggie,_

 _Dad says not to worry, but Ty fell off the roof._

 _Travis,_

 _What do you mean Ty fell off the roof? Is he okay? What was he doing on the roof?_

 _The little boys were playing Superheroes. Guess Ty thought he could fly._

 _So, is he okay?_

 _Dad says it's probably not broken._

 _What's probably not broken?_

 _Just he's leg. Dad's taking him to the hospital now but he says it's probably not broken._

 _Let me know the minute you hear anything. Please._

 _Okay. Dad said they might keep him overnight._

 _For a probably not broken leg?_

 _No. For the concussion, but he said maybe they wouldn't. They might just stitch him up and send him home._

 _I'm calling your dad to see what's happening. I'll let you know what I find out._

 _Thanks, Maggie._

Dear Ty,

I'm so sorry you got hurt. I'm thinking of you and know everyone is taking good care of you. I hope you feel better really, really soon.

I love you,

Maggie

Der maGGiie,

It herts rilly baD. Nxxt time dDad saiys too cme down form tere im going too. I donnt no how SUPrMan dos it. Butt I get too stae home form scool so its weres the ComA thingie for words like its? ok. I love You, Ty

Dear Ty,

I'm glad you now know to listen to your dad, but I'm very sorry you are hurting.

I think you are looking for the apostrophe. It's right by the ENTER button.

'''''''''I funnd it''''''

I noticed : ) ''''back at ya''''

Dad saiyxs I have too go to bed now. i miss you.

Hey, it's me. Think I better set up a conference with his teacher to discuss his spelling?

It's cute, but how is he?

He's fine. How are you?

He's says he's really hurting? I'm fine. How about you?

He's the baby of the family; of course, he says he's hurting. Trust me, he's fine.

I'm good. At least I will be if I can keep the rest of them off the roof. Alex thinks it's not fair that Ty got to spend the night up at the hospital and he didn't. And Zech wants a cast, too.

: ) but are you sure he is really all right?

I'm sure. Quit worrying about him. It's me you should be worrying about. I have a feeling I'll be up in the cardio ward after Superman's bills start trickling in.

 _So about my science project. I thought-well, what do you think I should do?"_

 _Aren't you supposed to come up with the idea on your own?_

 _Don't think so. The library has like a thousand books of ideas for projects._

 _Maybe you should look at a few of them and see what interests you. Then we can talk._

 _Come on, Maggie. We both know your ideas will be way cooler than anything me or those dumb books will come up with._

 _You are quite capable of coming up with some great ideas, Josh._

 _Like what?_

 _Good try. Give it some thought and get back to me._

 _Fine, but if I flunk it will be all your fault!_

Dear Maggie,

Dad has been helping me look for maps of Antarctica on the iternet. we found some good wons. Do you want us to order you some?

Dear Alex,

I think I have enough maps for now, but thank you.

Dear Maggie,

Are you sure? Cause we could order them real easy. I don't think you can have two many maps. These wons show you were to look for peguins and stuff like that.

Dear Alex,

I'm afraid I don't have any time to go looking for penguins, but it certainly sounds fun.

How about if you just have your Dad email me the site with the maps, and then I can order them if I end up needing them?

 _Hey there, Beautiful. Danny and that girl he's been seeing came over tonight. Guess they plan on getting married here sometime._

 _Wow. Congratulations. Which girl is this?_

 _Karen isn't it? Or Carrie? You met her that day at the park. Not the blond, the dark one._

 _Really? I don't remember any dark Karen or Carrie. Is she nice?_

 _How did Ty's doctor appointment go?_

 _Maybe it was Kara? I don't know._

 _The appointment is tomorrow._

 _Didn't you just say she was there tonight, Sir? Do I sense you're not too thrilled about Danny marrying her?_

 _That's right. For you anyway. Don't forget it._

 _I won't._

 _I'd be a lot happier about it if there hadn't been a new one of them every couple of weeks._

 _Yeah. Well maybe this is the one, Sir._

 _Ok. Here's the scoop from Travis. Her name's Kayla or some such thing. She's got short, brown hair. He says you met her at Walmart._

 _And that nasty Sir is creeping back in._

 _Right. I remember her. Nice girl._

 _Danny seems to think so._

Hey. I'm no good at these things, but I wanted to say I love you.

I love you, too.

Are you all right? I thought you were going fishing?

No one really felt like it.

No one felt like fishing? Are you sure you're all right?

I guess. It's just...do you have any idea how much I miss you? I've spent half the day looking at travel sites. I thought maybe the boys and I could come down just for a weekend or something over their Christmas break, but I'd have to sell the boat, the house, and half the boys to buy the tickets so that isn't happening.

But I did want you to know I'm thinking of you. And I hope you know I love you and I miss you. And I really, really regret not letting you talk me into coming down there with you.

I'm sorry. I don't even know what to say. I have a meeting in five minutes and now you have me crying. I wish things could be different. I miss you too, very much.

Don't go doing that. I didn't want to make you feel bad. You told me it would be like this, and even if I'd believed you I'd have married you anyway. I'm a big boy and I imagine I'll survive. And I won't sell the boat so you can quit crying.

Better go to your meeting. Knock 'em dead.

 _Hey, Maggie,_

 _You any good with math? If I don't pull my grade up I'm going to be benched, and I can't get these quadratic equations at all. Neither can Dad. I know you're busy so if you don't have time I can try Matt and Debbie, one of them might know. They are coming over tonight. Don't tell Dad. It's a surprise._

 _Trav,_

 _I'm okay with math. Where are you having the problem? I might be able to help._

 _What's the surprise? They come over three or four times a week._

 _Well, they have something to tell him. I don't get any of it._

 _Any of the math or any of what they have to tell him?_

 _The math. They just want to tell him they are having a kid. Like that's a big deal around here._

 _I'm sure it is to them._

 _I suppose. Here's the first problem: x squared + 4x - 16_

So, Josh, what's up with the science project?

I was thinking maybe I could do something with that experiment you guys are doing down there. You know with those blood samples you took down from all of us?

What did you have in mind?

I don't know. What were you guys going to do with them?

That isn't my project, Josh. I just got the samples for the group who needed them. I don't know much about it.

Well, did they find what they were looking for?

I'll have to ask, but I don't really see how getting their results will do much for you anyway. You need to find something you can do yourself.

 _Dr. Beckett:_

 _Any progress isolating the Ancient gene in the blood samples I provided?_

 _Colonel O'Neill:_

 _Nothing new to report since we spoke this morning. May I respectfully remind you this is a long-term project?_

 _Furthermore, is it possible you could speak to Dr. McKay? He is insisting on making me sit in that blasted chair even though it has been demonstrated repeatedly that I cannot make the thing work. I can hardly be expected to get results with him hounding me constantly._

Josh,

I contacted the team handling the experiment but it is complicated and not really something you can work up in three days, especially without government funding. Sorry.

JSJSJSJSJSJJSJSJ

She had not anticipated the difficulty in isolating the Ancient gene though she should have. The SGC had had a significant leg up from both the Asgard and the Tok'ra which had doubtlessly made the task much easier for the Dr. Beckett of her world. In comparison, these folks were still practically in the dark ages.

Neither had she anticipated having so much difficulty finding someone to sit in the chair. The fact three of the twelve folks she'd known to have the gene in her timeline had never even been born didn't help. Of the others, one had died in childhood, one was an inmate in an insane ward, and another serving out a life sentence in a high-security prison. That left them four civilians (Three, including Jon O'Neill, who when approached had with varying degrees of reluctance agreed to donating blood samples for a vague government experiment they'd little understood and (hopefully) quickly forgotten; and one antigovernment to an extreme who wouldn't even do that). No one, particularly Carter herself, wanted to bring civilians into the project if at all possible.

Which left them only two candidates for the chair: Carson Beckett who in another life and time had hated and feared the chair only slightly less than he did now, and Captain John Shepherd who thought the project a colossal waste of time and cooperated only under orders. The natural ability to control the Ancient technology he'd shown in the original timeline was sadly lacking. Shepherd, on occasion, had managed to turn on the power but that was as far as either of them had gotten.

Without actually isolating the gene so they could identify others who might be more able to perform the job, the person in the chair was a major wrench in the works. It was, however, far from the only hitch. There was an extraordinary amount of work to do in analyzing, initializing, inventorying, and understanding what they were dealing with in an attempt to interface the alien technology with their own.

That at least hadn't surprised her, three years after Jack had used the weapon to defeat Anubis, the scientists from her timeline had still been studying the weapons platform when they'd vanished from time or been rewritten into elementary science teachers, college professors, and hair dressers.

Which meant they had their work cut out for them, but the research team had slowly begun to get a feel for what they were working with...it was time to go home.

 _Author's Notes: Hopefully the email exchanges aren't too disjointed to follow...my apologies._


	7. Confronting Reality

She slept twenty-three of the twenty-five hours she spent in flight and arrived in Minnesota refreshed and a day earlier than she'd left McMurdo. It was just as well.

Jon had taken the boys out of school for the first few days of her visit and then there'd been the weekend. By the time she'd seen, heard, and done all they wanted her to do, she was more exhausted than she could ever remember being.

"I don't know how you keep up with them," she told Jon on one of the rare occasions they'd actually had a moment to sit on the couch and do nothing. He'd laughed, and David had appeared at her knee with a chessboard.

"You said you'd teach me to play," he said.

"That I did. Set it up." And that pretty much summed up the first five days of her visit.

The last days never happened.

"Carter," she automatically answered her phone when it roused her from a deep sleep. Still more than halfway asleep, she didn't catch her mistake. Jon heard it though. It sent a jolt through him, but it only told him what he already knew.

He hadn't wanted to know, and he certainly hadn't wanted to invade her privacy. But, if one day her picture did appear on the cover of the Enquirer...he didn't want to be as shocked as the boys. Someone would have to be there to answer their questions, and that someone was most likely going to be him.

Besides, it wasn't like she wouldn't tell him if she could.

He'd spent a fair amount of time online and at the library reading the articles, looking at her pictures, and listening to her interviews, final words, and even her eulogy. The articles had told him among other things that Dr. Samantha Carter's father, like Maggie's, had been career military. The pictures had proven Marla right; they were the spitting image of each other. The interviews were even more convincing; the voice, the expressions, the smile they were all Maggie, a younger, more...optimistic Maggie, but still very recognizably her.

He'd found listening to the recording of Samantha Carter's last words ("Thank you, Sir. It's been an honor. [This in response to a message from the President expressing the nation's appreciation for her sacrifice] Endeavour out.") unbearably difficult in much the same way he couldn't take remembering that last 'Love you guys' Jamie had called on her way out the door.

He hadn't needed to hear the name coming from her own lips to know that he was married to Samantha Carter, a woman who was living a very corporeal existence more than five years after her well-documented death.

He rolled over slowly to watch her. The darkness obscured her features and turned her face into that of a stranger. A stranger who was physically sitting on the edge of his bed but was who knew how far away. A stranger who'd come to visit as he'd asked but who had yet to truly introduce herself. A stranger he loved. He reached out a hand to place a hand on her shoulder and claim her as the woman he knew and loved, but something stopped him.

Listening to her end of the conversation, he knew that whatever the call was about it wasn't good news.

"Of course," she said, "I'll be ready in the hour, Sir, but if it's them, and I'm sure it is-we're not anywhere near ready for this. What is the status of the Gate?" she sighed in frustration at the answer and shook her head. "That's not good enough. Sir, I think we need to bring the civilians in on this."

She turned then and looked at him. She didn't give him an apologetic grimace at finding the call had awakened him, neither did she give him a reassuring smile to tell him it was business and nothing to do with him. Instead she stared at him as though he were the stranger in her bed as she continued, "I agree, Sir, but-we've got no one sitting in the chair, Mr. President."

Mr. President? As in The Mr. President? Was he actually lying in his bed listening to her speak to the President of the United States of America? Those meetings she'd attended in Washington...there were lots of meetings going on in Washington and only so many of them went on in the White House. He'd had no reason to assume hers had...but Mr. President?

She was focused on the voice in her ear and the thoughts in her mind and if she saw his consternation it didn't register. She said, maybe to The President of the United States and maybe not, "And without it, conventional weapons-right, I've said it all before and I'll continue to say it: we're dead in the water without the weapon. But right now I've got someone who might just be able to blow those ships out of the water...I'd like permission to bring him in. Sir."

"Right here. With me. Yes, Sir, I am aware I will have some explaining to do...but right now? Thank you, Sir. Good luck to you, too." She broke the connection and only then did her eyes seem to register him. Their focused intensity softened and he knew she'd put her mind to telling him her leave was over.

"Jon, I need to get back to Antarctica...now, tonight. And I need you to go with me."

"Me?" he stammered when her words sunk in. "I gathered you were on your way, but...I've got work in the morning and the boys have school. If I keep them out any longer the truancy board is going to have my name."

"That doesn't matter right now. Call Matt and Danny. See if one of them can come stay with the boys-get them to school and practice and wherever else they need to go. You've got to come with me," she said urgently, "and our transportation will be here any minute." She thrust her phone out towards him, but he was still shaking his head at the ludicrousness of her suggestion.

"Fine. I'll do it myself. Get dressed. Now." Even while she'd been arguing with him, she'd been stripping off her nightgown and pulling on the uniform she'd hung in the closet next to his wedding suit five days before. He watched her still trying to get his head around what was going on.

"Jon," she snapped at him, and he slowly began to believe the soft-spoken woman he and his sons loved could actually be an Air Force colonel. She shook her head at his failure to get moving and dialed her phone.

"Matt, this is Col-this is Maggie. Your dad and I need to go away for a few days...right away, now...um, can you and Debbie...? Yeah. It's important. I'm not sure...less than a week, I'd think. It's an emergency, and I don't have time to explain...Thanks. Thanks a lot." She snapped the phone shut and tossed it to him. He automatically caught it. "Call work and tell them you'll be gone," she ordered him. When he made no move to obey she said, "Or don't. I'm sure when this is over, we'll be able to get your record cleared."

"That...that really was The President on the phone?"

"Yes."

"And, he's going to square it with the mill if I'm gone a week?"

She shrugged as she tossed things into her bag, "Probably not in person...just an aide or someone."

"Oh," he said shaking his head as though all of this made sense, "Sure...that will go over well in the break room."

"This isn't a joke, Jon," she began in exasperation, but the lights from a vehicle pulling up outside flashed in the window. She flew out of the room to get the door before the kids were woken up by the bell. "Get ready now, or I'll have them drag you out of here in your shorts," she warned him in a hissed whisper over her shoulder.

By the time he joined Maggie and their guests in the living room, several of the boys were sticking their heads out of their bedroom doors. "Come on out," he told them quietly, "and get your brothers." When they'd all assembled in their rumpled pajamas, he said, "Maggie and I are going off for a quick trip..." and handled the fallout from that announcement as well as he could while Maggie threw unhappy, concerned looks their way and talked quietly and urgently to the three uniformed men perched stiffly on his living room couch.

"Who are those men?" Ty asked suspiciously. "They can't take Maggie away, she has two more days!"

Bryan stuck his hand in Jon's and added, "And you aren't supposed to go away. Ever."

"You can't," Alex said. "You don't have a map."

"All right, boys," Maggie said from the doorway. Jon looked up to see the men were already gone and Maggie was poised to follow them. "We've got to go." The boys flocked her with protests and hugs. For a brief moment it looked like the Marines might need to come back in to extricate the pair of them, but she made short work of pulling him away from his sons and dragging him out the door.

The boys were left crying after them. And if he'd been confused and unhappy before that scene, he was downright upset and angered now. He threw her an unhappy glare from his seat beside the driver. She glanced up at him with regret clear in her face, but there was no time for her to offer an apology or him to voice his displeasure before the men on either side of her were thrusting clipboards in her face while murmuring and pointing here and there on the papers as though they needed her blessing. She threw him a repentant look and promptly forgot him.

He watched her frowning over this paper, rapidly scanning over another before shaking her head, pointing out something on yet another, and quietly asking to be shown something else. He watched the men rifle through their piles of folders and clipboards of papers to produce what she was looking for, watched them look to her for direction and instruction, heard their murmured 'Yes, Ma'am's, and tried to reconcile the woman he knew (or didn't as was becoming all the more apparent) with this woman before him.

Once out of the residential area, their transport suddenly produced lights and sirens, and they were summarily running across the tarmac to board a military jet that would make mincemeat of those twenty-five hours she'd spent flying home.

"Mr. O'Neill, I'm Colonel Davis, United States Air Force," a man stated holding out his hand and directing him off to one side of the plane while Maggie and her cohorts pushed farther on. He sighed in irritation and shook the man's hand. "I understand you'll be making the trip with us. If you'll take a seat and secure your restraints there are some papers we need you to look through and sign before we arrive in McMurdo."

There were roughly thirty pages of papers and not one designed to make him feel any better about leaving his sons home and finally getting his chance to fly with the Air Force. He dutifully signed each one anyway because what were they going to do if he refused? Hand him a parachute, a compass, and a map and say, "Okay, fella, so long?"

"Thank you, Sir. We'll be in the air a few more hours, you might want to get some sleep."

"No. I want some answers. I've signed all your papers promising I'll die or sacrifice my firstborn before I tell a soul what I see or hear here...so how about giving me something to make it worthwhile?"

"I'm sorry, Sir. I believe that the Colonel will brief you later."

"Fine. Then how about you take me to Maggie?"

"Maggie? Colonel O'Neill? She's in conference at the moment."

"Right. Of course, she is. All right. I give up. How about a movie?"

"Sorry, Sir."

"Peanuts?'

"I'll see what I can do, Sir," Davis said with a small smile.

"You do that," Jon said and sighed. It was going to be a long trip. He watched the clouds pass quickly by beneath them and wondered how the boys were doing.

When Maggie eventually made her way back to him, his mood had not improved. Before she could even speak, he snarled, "You have a funny way of keeping us out of whatever it is you're up too."

She nodded wearily in acknowledgement and took the seat beside him. "This has nothing to do with that."

"Really? And just what does it have to do with?"

She looked him in the eye and answered, "National security...global security-it's all the same thing in this case. Earth is about to be attacked, Jon."

"Earth's about to be attacked, Jon? Is that the best you can do? I feel like I'm in a video game. And I hate playing games."

"I know, but this isn't a game. Do you really think the President of the United States would have sent a jet like this to ferry us to McMurdo for the fun of it? This is it...we're the first line of defense against what's coming out there. I know you're upset about leaving the boys like that-I am, too. And I know you hate not knowing what's going on. I promise I'll tell you what I can, but don't expect miracles-it won't be nearly enough to satisfy you. I'm sorry, I wish it were."

"Ok," he said throwing up his hands. "Give me what you've got."

"There are a group of technically advanced bad guys in the universe. They're called the Goa'uld. They're egomaniacs who enslave entire planets and destroy anyone who stands in their way. Obviously, we have no intention of letting Earth fall into their hands. There were, a million or so years ago, another group of aliens who have since died out. They left behind them various pieces of technology, one of which we hope to use in order to fight back the Goa'uld."

He nodded his head and gave her a go on look though he was buying none of it. She rubbed a tired hand over her face and went on, "The problem with the Ancient technology is that it is coded to operate only if it is activated by an Ancient."

"The long gone aliens?"

"Right. My team and I have been trying to find ways to interface our systems with it, but so far we haven't found a way to bypass the need for an Ancient. I tried. Please believe me, I tried. I never wanted to bring you down here."

"Stop right there and tell me just what I am doing down here. I know the gray's gaining ground but I'm not exactly ancient."

She gave him a weak smile that wasn't enough to ease his ever-mounting alarm or calm his ire. "The Ancient technology recognizes anyone with a specific gene...it's extremely rare in the population, but a few people living today have it. You are one of them."

"Me? I have some million or so year old alien gene?"

She raised a hand in a 'close enough' gesture and said, "Yes."

"You want to explain that to me?"

She shook her head. "Sorry, Sir...the biologists and xenobiologists will be working on that one for years to come." She laid her head back and closed her eyes. "If Baal gives us the time anyway." She stifled a yawn and worked a kink out of her neck, and he knew she needed to rest.

Yesterday, he would have let her. But, today he didn't feel like doing her any favors. He wanted answers and she was going to give them to him. "How do you know?"

She fought to open her eyes and asked, "Know what, Sir?"

He frowned at her. "Listen, you might be wearing the uniform and all but enough with the Sir's, all right?"

"Right. Sorry."

"Enough with the sorry's already too. Just tell me how do you know I have that Ancient gene? It was that blood work you talked me into a while back, wasn't it? Mine and the boys. It's not enough you've dragged me into this you want to pull them in too?"

"They're already in it, Jon!" she answered him in the same angry tone he was using. "When Baal comes there will be no schools or hockey games, no fishing, no boats out on the lake. Just death and endless drudgery, torture and atrocities you don't want to know about! And I'm just as upset about them being a part of any of that as you are! Where do you think I've been the last three months?"

She visibly calmed herself before going on, "The blood samples were to try to isolate the gene so we could identify military personnel with the same factor. I knew you had the gene, I hoped some of the boys might have inherited it and that by comparing all the samples we might find it faster...it was never to identify the boys as potential users of the technology."

He was not particularly mollified, "That's one thing you better be telling the truth about. If whatever you've got planned doesn't work, I don't want them anywhere near a weapons installation that will be the first thing targeted by your friend up there!"

"I agree. We will not be bringing them down here. I can get the President to guarantee you that in writing if you don't trust me."

"Maybe I should!" he snapped.

She whitened before his anger but managed to hold onto the fact she had a job to do. "I'll get Davis on it," she told him almost calmly. "He'll be getting you settled and briefed on the types of spacecraft Baal will be sending up against you."

"Against me? Me personally?" he asked.

"Against Earth and against the weapon once you bring it into the fight. He won't be expecting it. You'll have the element of surprise."

"I think you have me confused with someone else. I'm not your man. You need a soldier...someone who knows how to fight. By the sounds of it, several thousands of someones who know how to fight. Me, I just fish."

"You only need three things to win this battle, Jon...the Ancient gene which you already have, the certainty that you have to stop Baal from destroying Earth and the boys right along with it, and the willingness to do the job!"

"Really? And armed with all that I can take on the galactic bad guys?"

"Take them on and win."

"Must be quite the space gun."

"Not exactly, but it's extremely effective. It will do the job-if you'll cooperate."

"You can't know that. You don't have anyone in the 'chair'. That's what you told the President. You've never even test fired the thing, have you?"

"I've seen it work in another time and place. I've seen one of these weapons take out a force comparable to Baal's."

"Well, where's the G.I. Joe who fired it then? He'd have a much better chance of stopping Armageddon than I would!"

A stillness came over her at his words, and he thought he'd hit another dead end. But in a deceptively calm and emotionless voice she answered him, "He died."

He stared at her in disbelief, "Using the weapon?"

"No, no. Later. Baal killed him."

He knew he was missing something because this topic was too charged for her, but he couldn't quite connect the dots. "So, this weapon has already proven ineffective against this guy?"

"Not at all. This weapon is for planetary defense, it's stationary. He died on another planet, in a one-to-one confrontation with Baal."

"Another planet?" he asked weakly, suddenly more than tired of all of this. "When you said, we were from different worlds-"

His words were cut off when Colonel Davis hurried down the aisle and stopped before them, "Colonel, Baal's fleet is on the move. They are advancing past Jupiter right now, and they've sent what Colonel Mitchell has identified as long-range reconnaissance ships ahead. We're getting reports of sightings from all over the globe."

She sagged at the news but nodded her head in acknowledgement. At that moment, the jet banked violently to the left and went into a dive. She reached out and grabbed a handful of Davis' jacket to keep him from careening off into the bulkhead.

Jon fought down a wave of nausea and held tightly to the arms of his seat. "What was that?" he demanded.

"Evasive maneuvers-we must have picked up one of the gliders," she explained quickly to him and then turned to Davis, "Tell the pilot to divert from McMurdo-we can't lead that ship to the base!"

"He won't take those orders from me, Ma'am," Davis said. She nodded in resignation and rose to go to the front herself. As she hurried off she brushed her hand quickly across Jon's shoulder but didn't spare the time to speak to him again.

Colonel Davis did give him a brief, "Please, remain in your seat, Sir," before he too scurried away. Jon stared after them wondering who was going to keep the pair of them from flying into the nearest bulkhead if the pilot was forced into taking farther evasive maneuvers.

He'd been right to wonder because the next time was even steeper and rougher than the first. And things didn't improve from there. Even in his seat he was violently thrown around and had quite a time locating the airsickness bags before the energy bar Colonel Davis had found him earlier left him on the second roll. All in all the flight was definitely not making him regret his decision to marry Jamie instead of joining the Air Force.

But the chaotic flight was nothing compared to the turbulent turn of his mind. And even the most violent of twists and dives couldn't quell the question which was consuming him: how could she possibly know he had the Ancient gene?

She couldn't. Not if he was just the father of some boys she met by chance on the shore of the lake and one thing led to another. Not from the blood samples. She'd confirmed that herself; they were still trying to isolate the gene-they couldn't identify it yet. But, she knew he had it. How? And what did it mean that she knew? He was afraid to answer that.

There'd been a day, after Maggie had already left for Antarctica and before she returned, when he and the little boys had been sprawled around the living room watching an old _Star Trek_ rerun. It had been a day just like a lot of others, and then Travis had stuck his head in to ask what was for supper. The happenings on the screen had drawn him in as well.

Drawn him in and entranced him. From the doorway where he was still standing, Travis had pointed at the TV and nodded toward a bearded Spock from an alternate reality frowning at Captain Kirk. "Is that it?" he asked. "Is that what's up with Maggie?"

The boys took it as a joke. As, of course, they would because they all knew that Maggie lived in a different world from them. One where Jello came in blue as well as the more traditional colors; the Minnesota Golden Gophers had not held the national championship since 2003 as though their three consecutive wins in '05, '06, and '07 had never happened; Mars bars were awkwardly called Snickers Almond Bars; and Walmart was open 24 hours a day. The differences between their world and Maggie's were small and insignificant enough to be passed over with nothing more than a laugh and a 'guess I wasn't thinking', and the boys had delighted in catching her out in them whenever they could.

They bandied the idea around during the commercial and then promptly forgot it when the show came back on.

Travis had not been as ready to let the idea go. "Dad?' he'd persisted.

"Of course not, Travis. That's just TV-well, it's _Star Trek_ , so of course it's not Just TV," he quickly amended before he was attacked from every side. "But it's not real. Maggie's just too smart-she knows too much and sometimes the unimportant stuff gets mixed up in there and comes out a bunch of nonsense. Nothing as out of this world as that," he said motioning at the TV where good old Kirk, Spock, and McCoy were gathered around the Captain's chair once more safely back in their own dimension or universe or whatever it was.

Travis gave him a disappointed look as though aware he was as unwilling as he was unable to answer his questions. He'd gone off to raid the refrigerator and left Jon pursing his lips behind him.

Jon had spent a few minutes the next day googling alternate/parallel universes until he got a headache and came to his senses...he was not really contemplating the possibility he was living in a sci-fi story. Lots of folks confused their facts way more than Maggie.

That had been back before he was hurtling through the clouds with an alien spacecraft on his tail. He was finding it much more difficult to dismiss the suggestion now.

Because how could she possibly know he had the gene unless she'd learned it...how'd she put it? In another time and place.

"You're very much like him," she'd said of her dead husband. Remembering her stillness, her intensity as she'd spoken of him, he belatedly connected the dots and knew that was who had sat in the chair in that other place and time. He'd had the gene, too...she'd known that because she'd watched him use it. "You're very much like him," she'd said, but surely not that very much like him. Surely not.

Yet, how many times in the three weeks before she had had to report to McMurdo had she known exactly what he wanted and how he liked things? When she'd returned from shopping with the boys with his favorite brands and purchases, he'd figured the boys had paid more attention to what they were eating then he'd assumed. The same when she ordered pizza. And maybe that had been the case, but when they'd stood frowning over the glass case at the jewelers' she'd unerringly pointed at the very set he knew in the end he would have picked. And, when he'd reluctantly decided he'd wear a suit for the wedding, the first one she plucked off of the rack was the very one he eventually chose.

How could she have known his preferences like that and how could she know he had that alien gene?

"You're very much like him," she'd said.

And what was it Daniel had said, "Come on, Sam...you're right, he's not Jack. But those boys? Why didn't you tell me they were so...so Jack?" Of course, he wasn't Jack. So how could his sons be so like another man's that seeing them would shock and grieve his friend?

Spock with a beard but still undeniably Spock. "Is that it? Is that what's up with Maggie?" Travis had asked and he hadn't thought it was possible, but...how could she know he had the gene? Could Travis have hit the nail on the head that day seeing the alternate Spock?

"I can't join you in your world, Jon...and you do not want to join me in mine!" she'd said, and that had been hard enough to respond to when he thought she was speaking metaphorically. But, if her world literally wasn't his, if she'd come here from another reality or whatever it would be, if she'd left Jack behind dead in another time and place and came here...

The jet rolled wildly to the left, and he used another bag to rid his roiling stomach of the last of its contents wishing he could do the same for the thoughts whirling about in his mind.

Eventually, the wild twists and dives leveled out, and he was left to assume they'd managed to lose the enemy ship. She came to him shortly thereafter, looking a bit haggard and with her uniform somewhat mussed. He silently watched her make her way down the aisle, and neither of them spoke, until she'd slid into the seat next to him.

"We'll be arriving at McMurdo very shortly...we won't have much time. I'd hoped-well, it doesn't matter now. Baal's fleet could reach Earth at anytime. You should call the boys, Jon-"

"And tell them what exactly?"

"It doesn't matter, just let them hear your voice and know they're not alone in this-"

"Lying's your game not mine. They are alone in this because you dragged me down here. I should be with them!"

"Not if you want to save them," she answered quietly and her voice was steady with a conviction that he couldn't rattle. "We don't have time to argue. Davis will be here soon to brief you on the enemy ships. I've got to get back up there...I'll see you on the ground."

"Whatever, just go," he said.

She nodded her head and stood up but she didn't leave.

"Something else?" he asked.

"I love you," she said. "I just wanted you to know." She turned and began to walk away.

He almost let her go. But, despite his suspicions and despite the fact she'd forced him down here and expected him to save the world, he couldn't do it.

She'd begged him not to drag her into his world and he hadn't listened. She'd warned him he didn't want to join her in hers, and he'd shrugged it off. She was at fault, perhaps, for a good many things, but he was the one who hadn't read the warning signs and hadn't believed the danger.

She'd openly told him she was deceiving him, and he was the fool who'd conned himself into believing she was incapable of it...he'd been wrong beyond comprehension, but that was hardly her fault. And it wouldn't help him live with himself if in his anger and confusion he let her walk away and she didn't survive the coming battle.

"Maggie," he said urgently and she turned to look back at him. He released his restraint to stand up. "Come here," he said, and she slipped into his arms for a brief moment. "I love you, too," he told her. Despite everything he meant it.


	8. Painful Realities

Daniel met them as they disembarked. He gave Maggie a hurried awkward hug and Jon a quick nod.

"You didn't get here a minute too soon," he told them as they hurried into the building and on into an elevator. "They've gone into orbit. China and Russia are going ballistic...literally, if Hayes can't talk them out of it. That's the global report. Locally, the powers that be are not happy with you pulling this particular rabbit out of the hat."

"They can crucify me later," she told him shortly.

"They can forget the whole thing! They grilled us for five days. His name came up more than enough for them to know there wasn't a StarGate program without him. It's not your fault they didn't have the sense to see they'd eventually need to locate him."

"There's that," she said throwing uneasy glances at Jon that Daniel failed to heed. Jon, for once didn't pretend he wasn't listening but met her glance openly and defiantly.

"It's their own incompetence that kept them from connecting the one to the other."

"Maybe, but they would have had his name specified on my list of noncontacts if any of us had told them there was a personal connection...they'll have me there."

"You didn't exactly marry him behind their backs. You filed all the paperwork and got all the authorization you needed. If they can't figure out that the O'Neill you left behind-"

"Daniel!" she interrupted him, "Any minute now this world is going to start taking some heavy damage...let's concentrate on that right now, okay?"

Daniel looked over at Jon and nodded. "Right. So McKay is all but holding a gun on Shepherd to keep him in the chair. Not that it's doing any good for him to be there."

"So, even with Baal banging on the door...nothing?"

"Nope. He wants out to go join his unit...thinks he'd do more good there. I dare say he's right at this point."

"Beckett?"

"He was scared of the weapon before; now he's petrified...I can't believe he ever got up the courage to step foot in Atlantis."

"He didn't. That was another Beckett," she said as the elevator finally arrived at their destination. A group of worried folks greeted them and began escorting them rapidly down the hallway.

One elbowed to the front to inform them, "China just fired missiles on two of the motherships...the missiles were destroyed and Baal is retaliating. We have reports Beijing is being hit heavily. The President has ordered you to precede at best possible speed." By the time the speaker had finished with his report, they were skidding to a stop at what Jon took to be their destination because at its center was a large, throne-like chair.

He hadn't been expecting an actual chair...more a weapon, a high-tech, futuristic weapon. This was a bit fancy for the average dining room, but it definitely fell a bit short of his expectations. And apparently of the soldier sitting in it.

"Colonel O'Neill," he growled as soon as he caught sight of Maggie, "this is a waste of time...I-"

"Absolutely," she cut him off, "go join your unit if you want, Captain Shepherd."

The man sputtered to a surprised stop and then jumped up and out of the chair. "Yes, Ma'am," he said, glared at one of the men, and pushed his way out of the room before she could change her mind.

"Ugh! Now what did you go and do that for?" the recipient of Shepherd's glare squawked. "We need him! He's a complete-"

"Shut up, McKay!" she hissed at him before turning to Jon and saying, "Sit down." Jon uneasily stepped toward the chair but hesitated at its side. "Jon, people are dying right now. We need you. Sit down."

"Who's this?" McKay began. One of the military men stepped over to him and said, "I believe the colonel ordered you to be quiet. If you have a problem with following her orders..." McKay turned pale and decided he had nothing more to say.

Jon tentatively took Shepherd's place in the chair. And was immediately forced back against it as it lit up and reclined back like a super-charged dentist chair.

"Okay," McKay said promptly forgetting his orders. "That's more like it."

Jon looked at Maggie. "Is it supposed to do that?"

She grinned at him. "You bet. Just relax-"

At that point, Davis forced his way through the mob crowding into the room and announced, "Moscow has begun firing missiles. The Goa'uld are now moving their motherships to target major cities around the globe. We're getting unsubstantiated reports that D.C. and New York have both taken hits..." His words were followed by first a disbelieving, horrified silence and then a rush of murmured exclamations.

"Jon, look at me," Maggie ordered him, but he was trying to figure out just what time it was and where his sons were. He could picture them white-faced huddled around the TV watching the end of the world. He suddenly felt as sick as he had in the twisting, turning jet.

"Cam, get these people out of here!" she ordered and a few of the military officers began clearing the room. When most of the crowd was gone, she turned back to him, "Jon, the only way to stop what you just heard is to do this."

He met her eyes and nodded his head. "OK. What do I have to do?"

"Just concentrate. The chair will do the rest."

"Right," he said. He licked his lips, swallowed hard, and closed his eyes.

"Think about stopping them before they kill anyone else...the drones are ready to go, they just need you to direct them. Think about the schematics Davis showed you and think about bringing those ships down. Don't shoot down our own aircraft, target the enemy."

"Right," he said again. He tried to concentrate on what she was saying but all he could think about were his sons. Charlie and his family in Portland; Matt and Debbie and their baby not yet even born; Danny and...that girl; and the boys at home, frightened and alone, needing him. He wanted them safe, he wanted them away from all of this, and he wanted this over with so he could be home with them.

With the strength of that desire fueling him, the chair did the rest. Thousands of drones activated and poured up into the sky and on into the atmosphere seeking out every Goa'uld vessel and destroying each one. The fleet fell in a matter of three minutes and fourteen seconds.

"Jon," she said from a great distance, "don't use more of the drones than you have to. We need some in reserve."

It took him a moment to know she was talking to him and a moment more to understand what she was saying. He looked out over the Earth and found the enemy vessels were all gone. They would not threaten the boys again. He released the rest of the drones, let them power down and lie dormant once more. And then he did the same with the chair.

As soon as he dropped his concentration, he was swamped with the sounds of cheers and yells from the hallway. There was a celebration going on out there. He opened his eyes and found Maggie grinning at him. Behind her, Daniel and another colonel nodded and smiled with satisfaction.

"That's it, right?" he asked just to be sure.

"Oh, yeah," Daniel answered him. "That pretty much takes care of the problem."

"I want to talk to the boys," he said.

"Well, seeing how you just saved the world, I think we can let you do that," a stocky man in uniform said from the doorway. "And then I believe the President would like to speak to you."

Maggie and the colonel both jumped to attention and murmured, "General."

"At ease, Mitchell. Help Mr. O'Neill call home. Make sure he remembers the nondisclosure agreement he signed while he's at it. But you and I, Colonel," he said to Maggie, "are going to have a talk." He motioned with his head to the side of the room, and with a 'Yes, Sir' she followed him over. Daniel started to join them but the general shook his head a decisive no.

"It's all right, Daniel," Maggie said quietly and Daniel subsided. Jon watched the pair of them uneasily until Danny answered the phone back home, and then he was too busy trying to reassure himself that his sons really were all right and them that he and Maggie were fine.

He found to his relief that the youngest boys had never realized the seriousness of the situation. They were still largely unhappy that he and Maggie had run off, but the reports and TV images of the alien attack had hardly seemed real to them at all. For them, it was the stuff of fantasy and adventure. Unfortunately, the others were all old enough to have understood at least partly the danger and horror. It would take much more than a few minutes on the phone to get them through the trauma, but he did what he could.

In the meantime, Maggie and the general had their talk. He would occasionally glance that way and see them still going at it. It was easy to see that the general was not at all pleased with her even if she had just saved the world. At times their voices rose until they intruded into his conversations.

 _"You agreed to not have any unapproved contact with anyone from your previous life, Colonel. Do you deny that?"_

 _"No, Sir. But I do respectfully deny that I broke that agreement."_

 _"Really. Than what is HE doing here?" the general waved his hand in Jon's direction._

 _"That, General Landry, is Jon O'Neill. He's a civilian, works in a lumber mill, has ten sons, and spends his summers fishing. He is not the man I knew, Sir, and he is not the man you think he is."_

 _"Could have fooled me."_

"You purposely withheld information!"

"We were trying to convince you that Baal was a threat, that one day he'd show up and do exactly what he tried to do today...the fact the general and I were married didn't really play into that. Sir."

 _"So he knows nothing?"_

 _"I didn't say that, General. I said I haven't told him anything. But, they don't award stars to men who can't make inferences and draw their own conclusions-he's not the man you think he is, Sir, but I think we have to assume after this incident he's not completely in the dark."_

That was a wise assumption. Whatever doubts he'd still had when they'd landed had long since disappeared. And he was even angrier than General Landry about the whole situation. But then it had been a bit more personal to him than it had been to the general. A far bit more.

JSJSJSJSJSJSJSJS

He knew as soon as he opened the door; the quarters someone eventually showed him to were not empty guest rooms. The walls were plastered with the notes and pictures the boys had sent her along with more than a few of the maps Alex had been compelled to supply her. His wedding picture stood on the desk, and the boys' school pictures were stuck in the frame of the corkboard over it. In the middle of the board, there was a printed copy of an email he'd sent her once when he'd been missing her even worse than usual.

He had insisted on marrying her. He was old fashioned enough to believe in it, and he had little kids in the boat for goodness' sakes! And that had all been true, but even more he'd wanted it in writing, wanted it legal and binding so the next time she decided it was a mistake it would be all the harder for her to run. She'd gone along with him, said her vows there in front of the judge with the little boys giggling on the courthouse benches and the older ones tugging uncomfortably on their brand new ties.

But it had all been a sham. And now that he thought about it probably invalid anyway, because she'd perjured herself signing a false name to the marriage license.

He prowled through the small rooms shamelessly examining her things. The uniforms hung neatly in the closet, the sweats she slept in folded inspection ready in the drawers. The bare cupboards and the small refrigerator emptied of everything but a bottle of ketchup and a small lockbox in the tiny freezer. The medicine cabinet stocked with nothing more than a bottle of Tylenol and an extra, unopened tube of toothpaste. Except for the pictures and maps...she hadn't lived here anymore than she had at her cabin. It had been the same at the house, when she'd packed her bags and gone there was virtually nothing to prove she'd ever been there with them.

Temporary housing. That's what these rooms were. What the cabin had been. What his house had been. "You can be in our world. You're more than welcome," he'd told her meaning forever, but he knew now she'd only taken him up on his offer to come for a visit.

She'd never intended to stay. They'd needed him to sit in that chair; she'd made sure he'd be available when the time came. The danger was over now. She no longer needed him. And he had to face the fact she had never loved him. She'd loved the man who'd sat in the chair in some other time and place.

"You're very much like him," she'd said. But not close enough.

"He is not the man you think he is," she'd told the general. Close enough to fool Landry, close enough to use, close enough that she'd had no trouble manipulating him. But not close enough for her to keep now that she no longer needed him. Not close enough for her to love.

JSJSJSJJSJSJ

She sighed as she walked wearily down the hallway towards her quarters. She felt that she'd done nothing but fight battles for the past...what? She couldn't guess and she was far too tired to figure it out with all the time changes and the Date Line...and it didn't matter anyway. She was dead on her feet, and she knew waiting for her behind her closed door would be the most difficult battle of the day (or days...whichever it worked out to be).

Which was saying a tremendous amount because it had started with literally dragging Jon from the arms of his crying children and culminated with finally and decisively giving Baal exactly what he deserved. Thrown in for good measure had been the game of cat and mouse in the skies over Antarctica, the dressing down from Landry, and Cam's desertion.

 _"Well, it's been one wild ride, Carter," Cam told her in his slow drawl when she'd hung up from taking the President's congratulatory call._

 _"It certainly has." She'd grinned over at him, for one brief moment savoring the victory instead of dreading its consequences._

 _"Listen, it's been an honor to serve on SG-1. We made a good team, but..."_

 _"But, what?" she asked knowing the moment was over._

 _"We've made the world a better place, saved it from Baal." He shrugged, "That's enough for me. I can't live a double life. Either I'm all for this one or I'm all for that one; and seeing that one is out of reach..." She'd stared numbly at him, not really believing what she was hearing. He went on anyway, "I'm done, Sam. I know you and Jackson won't quit into you've gotten back there, finished the job. But whatever the two of you cook up-you'll go on without me. Understand?"_

 _Of the six billion people on the planet, she probably should have been the one to understand. But, she hadn't._

 _"Just like that? You're just going to walk away?"_

 _"Yep. Just like that," he said. And just like that he'd nodded his head in a silent farewell and walked away._

And as though that hadn't been enough there'd also been the talks she'd had with the boys over the phone.

Matt had said only half-joking: "Listen, Maggie, next time you have an emergency see if you can pick a better time, will ya? We really needed Dad home during all this."

Alex, as sober and as sad as a funeral: "The TV said they wiped Beijing right off the map...how are you and Daddy ever going to find the way home now?"

Zech, sniffing into the receiver: "We were really, really scared and we want you to come home. We want you and Daddy to come home now. How come you had to go away and take Daddy right when we needed you?"

Ty had sobbed so much she had only known what he was saying because he'd said it so often before.

David, who had been her anchor and her friend when she needed them both badly: "If I'd known you would take Dad away from us, I'd never have asked him to marry you. You shouldn't have done that, Maggie. We need him here. With us."

Only Bryan had made the call bearable: "Did you see any of the ships, Maggie? They showed them on TV, zipping all over the sky! And the drones? Oh, wow! You should have seen it! It was the coolest thing ever!"

'The coolest thing ever' she thought and couldn't have agreed more. But she wasn't celebrating. All around her the base was; and people all over the world even though they couldn't begin to guess how serious their situation had been. She didn't have to guess. She knew. They had done a great thing today, and she'd had a part in that. She should have been laughing and dancing in the hallways with the others. But she wasn't.

Jon wasn't Jack, but she knew what she'd seen in his eyes on the jet and on the base. She'd known in the end she'd destroy him if she stayed with him and she'd been right. Already, she'd made great inroads in turning the happy-go-lucky fisherman she loved in this world into the hardened soldier she'd always feared in the man she loved in her own world.

And now he waited for her behind that closed door and she had no defense or excuse to offer him.

The room was dark with only a small light shining from under the bathroom door to help her make out his tall form sitting up against the headboard of her bed. She took a deep breath and walked into the room, letting the door close with a decisive click behind her.

"So," he said in his low, rough voice.

"So," she answered. She didn't know what he wanted her to say. She knew any apology she could offer would be received with angry recriminations; any excuse shot down with caustic sarcasm. She'd been here before, sometimes rightly ("We are watching good men die in slow motion, Captain!") and sometimes wrongly and there was no way for her to win. She knew sooner or later he'd say what he had to say and she'd stand before him condemned.

She came and stood by the bed. He shifted his long legs over to make room for her and she sat on its edge. "General Landry will be flying out of here in four or five hours...that's the earliest I can get you home to the boys."

"That's it then?"

"I hope not. I'll be recommending they offer you a civilian contract. Now that they've seen it work and know what it can do, I think Shepherd and Beckett will get somewhere with activating the chair, but we'll get a lot farther if we can call on you from time to time-I know you won't want to leave the boys much, if at all, but we'll take what we can get."

"We'll take what we can get...didn't I say something very much like that to you a long time ago?"

"Not that long ago."

"Long enough, Sam." She didn't flinch when he used her name and made no denial or acknowledgement. Because he wouldn't have accepted the one and he didn't need the other. He gave her time to react, but when she didn't he went on, "Tell me something, Sam, who do you make love to in the dark? Him or me, Jack or Jon, the general or the mill worker?"

It was an unfair question because as he well knew she didn't make love in the dark. She had always insisted they left at least a small light on. Because she had been afraid to find out the answer to that very question. She shook her head but couldn't draw in enough breath to answer him even if she'd known what to say.

He took her silence for an answer. "Yeah. That's what I thought. So, I catch that flight in the morning and you...?"

Tears ran down her cheeks and she didn't bother to fight them. She was already fighting one losing battle and couldn't spare the energy. "Jon," she said but didn't know how to ask him, beg him not to hate her.

"Don't say it. I don't want to hear it. You did what you had to do to save the world...I got that. The end justifies the means and all that. And truthfully, I can't fault you. They made me sign my life away too. Not to the same degree, but close enough for me to know you couldn't have warned me any more openly without ending up locked up somewhere instead of being out here saving the world.

"You know what? I don't even think you could help it, making the boys and me love you...I believe you really never meant for that to happen. Your plan would have been just as effective if you'd just been a family friend, wouldn't it have? You'd have known where to find me when you needed me. I'm the one who wouldn't take no for the answer and forced you into this charade-"

"It was...it was never a charade, Jon, and I never had a plan to use you! I know it looks that way, meeting up with you like that. It looks like I set out to find you, but I didn't."

"Come on! Just for tonight, can't we lock the door and leave the lies outside? Don't you owe me that?"

"I'm telling you the truth! I didn't come to Minnesota to find you."

"Then why?"

"He loved the area, went there whenever he could get away. He said it was what the Goa'uld were really after in their quest for galactic domination. It was his anchor I always thought, the place that gave him the strength to keep fighting no matter how long the battle dragged on. I never had a place like that...I came to Minnesota hoping to find that. Because I knew if I didn't find the strength to keep fighting, I'd surrender, give up the fight, disappear.

"I didn't come looking for you. I know right where his cabin used to be... I would have looked for you there if I'd wanted to find you-a good hundred miles away.

"You were, in fact, the last person I ever wanted to meet. I missed him constantly, do you think I wanted to see his face on a stranger?" She buried her face in her hands and cried.

He reached out a hand and rested it on her shoulder. "That's the truth?"

She nodded.

"But once you met me, you felt...what? That you could hold on to a bit of him by being with me?"

"No!"

"Then why is my ring on your finger? Why did you let me move you into my house, why did you let my sons believe you loved us?"

"Because I did, because I do!"

He shook his head, "No. You love him, you told me so yourself."

"I do...I do love him. I always will. And you've always known that. But I love you too.

"You are not Jack O'Neill, and if you were I would have skipped town the minute you introduced yourself to me in the street. I couldn't have...I couldn't." She closed her eyes and bit her lips and through her tears said, "I love you, Jon. You're not him, and I don't want you to be-I love you just the way you are."

For a long moment the only sound was her muffled sobs, and then he said, "Okay. I can live with that."


	9. Parting Reality

Daniel arrived before she did, but then he had fewer good bys to say.

Neither of them had wasted anytime getting there. When Rear Admiral Forrester called inviting them to come down and 'consult' on the Gate, they'd both jumped at the chance. They'd been waiting well over two years for the chance to get near the StarGate and no one had to ask them twice.

She'd known eventually, if they bided their time, proved their trustworthiness to the authorities, never made a move or reference that would tip their hand...this day had had to come.

(And for all their blustered indignation over finding out she'd married the O'Neill of this world right under their noses, the authorities had taken comfort in that. They'd believed she'd traded her world for theirs as easily as green Jello for blue. Jack for Jon as though they were interchangeable. She'd been completely truthful with Landry when looking back she might have been wiser to play that scene differently. Fortunately the brutal truth had escaped him and those over him. Jon was not Jack; they were mistaken to assume that even in her weakest moments she didn't hold onto that one truth. She'd spent untold hours convincing these people of so many of their mistakes, but that was not one of them.)

The need for 'consultation' had not come as a surprise to any of SG-1. In the course of rewriting history in his favor, Baal had had no choice but to undo every victory Earth had made in the ten years of the StarGate program. In doing so, he had once again unleashed on the universe far more enemies than the Goa'uld themselves. It had been only a matter of time before one of them made their presence known, and this world was not so different from their own that it would not have something to say about that.

So although she looked with abhorrence and revulsion at the Replicator blocks scattered under the glass of the case before them, she was not surprised. Daniel, looking at her face and not the deactivated remnants of a battle they'd already fought and won more than once before, said quietly, "Yeah, my thoughts exactly."

She looked up to meet his gaze and make sure he understood that she was right there with him. Regardless of the good bys that had slowed her down, she was no more willing than he was to let this long-awaited opportunity pass them by.

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Since the defeat of Baal, she'd divided her time between her ongoing work with the Ancient technology and the family. The urgency with which she'd fervently struggled to bring the weapon on line was gone leaving her free to spend more time at home and less in the lab. They'd collected huge amounts of data that needed analyzed and studied about the Ancient weapon and technology, and as that was just as well done from a secured computer lab in Minnesota as the installment in Antarctica...well, it was a lot easier and quicker to run home to celebrate one of the boys' birthdays, take part in their parent-teacher conferences, or spend a few hours fishing.

Here in this world she found a balance between work and home that she'd never found in her own. In part or perhaps mainly because they'd given her no place in whatever (if any) StarGate program they'd developed. She was left, like she'd left the civilians back home, dependent on people she did not know to fight battles she could not imagine without her knowledge, input, or help. She didn't like being in the dark. Not one bit. She wanted to know what she was up against and she wanted to be right there in the fight.

But, as for the rest of it? It was nice to have long hours with the people she loved enjoying a world very much like the one she'd fought for all those years. It was good to know that regardless of how painful and hard the choices they'd made had been, they'd been right to put the fight before themselves. It was a good life they'd sacrificed themselves to preserve and well worth all it had cost them...

The balance between that good life and her work was rather precarious because there was never a time when her work didn't call to her with its siren song or one when the pressures and needs of everyday life didn't place their demands on her to be home, to be more involved in the boys' lives, to spend more time with her husband, to be Maggie instead of Colonel O'Neill.

Not that Jon and the older boys didn't try their hardest to keep their own desires and needs as well as those of the littler boys from exerting undue pressure on her. He'd promised her they'd be happy with whatever time she could spare them, and he did his best to make sure she didn't have to know they frequently weren't. She didn't fault him when his best often fell short because she knew he'd set himself an impossible task with that promise anyway.

Still, they were happy despite the occasional difficulties she had in keeping all of the balls in the air.

She'd delegated the majority of the work to others and turned a blind eye to the rest to spend most of the summer in the boat with them. That Herculean effort had not gone unappreciated or unnoted. She'd earned herself as many reproof-free all-nighters in the lab as she could physically handle, as many murmured phone consultations through supper as she would ever need, and an almost infinite amount of free "Earth to Maggie...where are you?" moments when she was physically present with them but mentally at work. Not a bad return at all when it had been her pleasure and she wouldn't have traded those moments for anything.

Anything but the world as she knew it should be. These wonderful young lives that she was blessed to share, this lovely man who swallowed down all his fears and questions to love her in spite of them...for all she loved them, for all she treasured every moment she had with them, they had no place in reality. Not the reality that must take precedence anyway.

They were a lovely dream that she consoled herself with and would hate to see slip away, but when the time came, when the chance to wake up to a new day in the real world arrived...she'd shake off the dream and rejoin reality. Her reality, the one that had the right to exist because it was the true one. The one to which she owed her loyalty because she'd sworn it freely, without any reservations whatsoever, without any purpose of evasion, and without the point of Baal's sword at her neck.

Every moment she spent loving Jon and his sons made what would one day have to come more difficult, but it never brought it into question.

She'd spent the most terrifying hours of her life puking her guts up into the toilet and praying she'd miscalculated her dates, but even that hadn't swayed her determination to one day wipe this world and its people from existence. She'd wept in relief when the test had come back negative and she'd done what had to be done to make sure she never had to live through that particular horror again. But not because it would have stopped her from doing the job.

She didn't think she could have loved the boys more if she'd borne them herself. But not being the one who'd put them in harm's way to begin with helped her bear the guilt of what she would one day do. She would be responsible for wiping them from existence but not for placing them in this doomed world to start with. Baal would share the guilt with her for them; she alone would bear it for a child she conceived and brought into this world. Jon would certainly have no share in that burden; and even Daniel wouldn't be able to help her carry it when everything else had been put right and this was only a memory of a time that had never existed.

That unbearable guilt would eventually have destroyed her but only later. After she'd carried out the actions that would condemn this world, when she lived out her solitary and wary end back in her own past.

Unless they were somehow able to right the timeline in such a way she was rewritten by time and mercifully lost the memory of what she'd done. That unlikely scenario was in one sense imminently more desirable. She wouldn't have to mourn this man, these children, this life...but in another way that too was a sorrow. She couldn't deny that it hurt to think that even the memory of them might be forever lost. She loved them, and she did not want to forget their trusting faces, their laughing voices.

"Who taught you to fish, Maggie?" Travis laughed and they'd all joined in. Because Jon had taught them almost before they could walk. Jack, on the other hand, had taught her. To one catching a fish was as simple as throwing out a hook and line; to the other it was so unlikely that he could be content fishing in a pond without any fish at all.

"Watch what I can do, Maggie!" one of them was always calling, and she would always watch with delight in her eyes because she knew she'd been granted a great privilege in being able to share in the wonder of their lives.

"You know, I don't know what we would have done if you hadn't come to the lake. I thought we were happy, that we were fine, but...we needed you. We still do. I'm so thankful you came to our world," he'd told her in one of those rare moments when he'd felt compelled to try to put his feelings for her into words.

She'd kissed him in response, held him close in the dimness of their shared bed but otherwise she'd answered him only with silence. Because, she'd done him no favors in joining his world, and the very existence of it was the destruction of her own.

When she wasn't focusing on what she'd lost, she was happy, very happy in his world, sharing in their lives, being there in his embrace. It would have been a wonderful fantasy if it wasn't such a bitter reality. For she always carried within her the knowledge that its existence doomed her world, and her own continued existence would one day do the same to theirs. She could not answer him easily and honestly, "There's nowhere else I'd rather be."

Because there was. No matter how happy she was here, she never forgot it wasn't the way it should be, the people she loved here were not who they should have been or even worse should not even be at all.

"You think too much," Jack would have told her if he'd been the one holding her. But Jon just kissed her back and refused to acknowledge or question her silence. Even so she suspected that it hadn't gone unnoticed.

It was possible that in her guilt she endowed him with more of Jack's qualities than he actually possessed. Maybe he really was content to accept the little he'd learned about her world and not follow it on to its inevitable conclusion. Maybe he didn't instinctively see into her soul and know she would gladly trade his world for her own. Maybe. Or maybe he was just too smart to fight with words what he knew was a battle of the heart.

Certainly, he couldn't begin to guess that one day she'd have the opportunity. He might know she was only in his life by default, but at least he didn't know there was any possibility she'd ever be able to do anything about that. She was sure of that because he held her, loved her, and trusted her. And she wasn't giving him too many of Jack's qualities to know that if he knew, if he even suspected that she was capable of that sort of betrayal there would be no place for her in his life.

"You think too much," Jack had complained more than once, and she knew at least in this case it would have been easier if she didn't. What did it mean that she could steal pleasure and even happiness in this world with a man whose life and happiness she fully intended to wipe out of existence at the first opportunity?

Was she the biggest hypocrite or the most ordinary of people? Wasn't it human nature to accept what happiness you could in whatever circumstance you found yourself in, all the time knowing things could be...better.

God help her, 'better' was the word she had to put there every time she followed this train of thought.

'Different' would fill in that blank just as well, without any of the soul-searching, self-recriminations that 'better' carried with it. 'Different' acknowledged a sad truth of her messed up life; 'better' condemned her. But, even in Jon's arms with the boys sleeping peacefully in their nearby cabins and the waves gently rocking the boat and moonlight quietly washing everything in its peaceful light, it was the only word she cut put in that blank. Whatever that made her.

She met Daniel's eyes without wavering, and let him read the shameful truth in hers. He nodded in understanding without any hint of blame or judgment. Because regardless of her self-guilt and condemnation she had committed no sin in loving Jon and the boys and she would commit no murder or betrayal when she let time take them. The crime and sin would be in turning her back on her own reality and letting theirs continue.

Daniel shifted to balance his weight enough to put a hand on her shoulder and let his presence speak of her innocence and the rightness of her decision. She gave him a sad smile of sincere gratitude because even though she couldn't trust her own judgment in this she could Daniel's.

"As a member of SG-1, he was our voice. Our conscience. He was a very courageous man. He was a good man. For those of us lucky enough to know him, he was also a friend." Jack had prematurely eulogized him a great many years before. Back when she'd still been young enough and optimistic enough to not understand how great a compliment the colonel had been paying the idealist in their midst.

She wasn't so young now and her optimism had bled out into the dirt of a far distant planet. She understood now. That hand on her shoulder meant a great deal.

"Tell us what you've got," she said turning decisively to the admiral, and they both listened attentively. But not for a clue as to how to stop the Replicators from following whatever SG teams this world was sending out there home. With any luck, time would erase them from the picture long before that became a real concern.

 _"So what's it looking like?" Jon asked when she called him from her assigned quarters later that night. "Will you be heading home anytime soon?"_

 _"I think so," she answered, and he missed all those little signs he'd learnt signaled a lie when she spoke to him face to face and hung up a happy man._

 _Charlie had promised to bring his family home for a few days at the end of the month, and he was looking forward to having everyone there. Danny and Kayla had been making little comments about Florida lately, and he was afraid they were working up the nerve to tell him they were thinking of moving. It was only a matter of time before he'd have family spread from one end of the country to the other with no hope of ever getting everyone home at the same time._

 _He could usually smile and say, "Go and have fun," when she answered the phone and got that look in her eyes, but this time he really, really wanted her home. Okay, so he always wanted her home, but usually he could stifle his desire and not beg her to stay home like Ty was wont to do. He hadn't been able to stop himself from asking when she thought she'd be home, but he would act his age and not pester her about it any farther. Especially as it didn't sound like he'd need to. She'd give her input on whatever they were doing wherever they were doing it and then fly home in plenty of time to not ruin their plans._

 _He carefully maneuvered around to hang up the phone without waking the newest O'Neill sleeping in a little bundle against his chest. The little guy was the first of the grandkids born close enough for him to get in his share of cuddling, and he welcomed every opportunity to babysit that came his way. He was a bit rusty as this was also the first born when he didn't have any little ones of his own, but the baby didn't seem to notice._

They spent two days at the SGC, feigning interest and showing due concern for the Replicator threat, before Daniel discovered the Mirror. She'd been stuck in briefings most of those two days, and it had been left to him to worm his way into the vault and get a look at what if anything the fledging program had managed to drag home.

Armed with info they'd freely given back when they thought this world might have been an ally instead of an enemy, this SGC hadn't had to waste time chasing around planets looking for interesting and useful technologies. Daniel recognized many of the items in the vault, but it was the Mirror that made his visit worthwhile.

He made a show of examining a communication stone while he thought about the Mirror and something she'd told him a year and a half before, "...in an alternate reality, there'd be no putting things right again-unless we started messing around with time there, too. All we could really do would be try to influence the course of events happening while we were there...we might alter the future but the past would remain unchanged."

It was something he'd considered off and on every since he'd met Jon and the boys that first time. She'd been terrified of staying with Jon O'Neill and his dark haired sons for a good many reasons. Some of them had been the same old fears that had kept her and Jack apart all those years. Some had been new fears surrounding her own conflicting feelings of loyalty and love. And some had been those they'd fought over that day in the cabin; that her lies and extended times away would destroy the family. He'd done what he could to convince her none of them were worth missing out on what she'd find out there in the boat.

Others of her fears though, he'd had nothing with which to counter them. The fear that her hands would be tied and she'd be unable to save them from Baal's evil reach. Time had alleviated that particular fear but there were others. The universe was full of bad guys and who knew when they'd turn their eyes on Earth? As long as they were unable to right the universe, as long as they lived in this timeline, she carried their protection and well-being as a sacred trust...one she feared she'd fail.

But over all her fears had been this one. This horrible knowledge that one day not only would she fail to stop destruction from coming to them, she'd willingly bring it down on them herself. She-both of them actually-needed to put things right, but the only way to do that would destroy this world.

But what if...what if they turned this around? Made this altered timeline an alternate reality? Couldn't they change time here thereby doing what they both knew had to be done-wiping the past seventy-odd years with everyone who'd lived in them out of existence and saving their own world and timeline-while letting these people and their world continue in another reality? Isn't that what she'd told him?

With the Mirror, couldn't they enter into a reality that was so close to this one as to be all but indistinguishable, save it from the Replicators, and leave it to go on without them while they came back here and found a way home? It wouldn't be a perfect solution...Jon and the boys would be erased from time here, but they'd live on elsewhere. And maybe he was oversimplifying and missing something, but he'd find it easier to act knowing that in at least one reality they would continue on and he knew she would as well.

He smiled hesitantly over at the seaman assigned to 'assist' him and said, "I don't see exactly what I'm looking for, but there are several things here that might prove useful. Can we get them moved to the lab Colonel O'Neill is using?"

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Sam, her mind running in a thousand different directions, read through the list of items he'd procured with only a passing interest. Her goal centered around gaining access to the StarGate and the people here were not making that easy. She had yet to even see what sort of a security set up she and Daniel would have to circumvent to get to the Gate. Who knew what system this SGC was using to power and run the Gate itself. They should have the DHD from Antarctica which would make hacking into the system vital only in locking down the area until she and Daniel could make good their escape. But, it was possible they'd gone with a system more like she'd outlined in her 'book' of the StarGate.

Getting through the Gate was the essential first step in righting time. Where they'd go after that...well, first things first. Their hands were effectively tied here with no hope of finding the solution they needed. Out there where anything was possible, she had a vague idea of studying Malikai's disastrous experiment a bit closer. Or making a visit to the Tok'ra, if they could locate them. Somehow Baal had found a way back in time; the Tok'ra would be the most likely-

Her mind came to an abrupt stop at the fifth item on Daniel's list: Quantum Mirror and remote. She looked up at him with awakening interest.

"So," he said casually, "what do you think? Any possibilities there?"

Her chest tightened in mingled hope and surprise and made it difficult to choke out an answer. She faked a cough hoping to cover from whomever was monitoring every move they made the fact he'd just handed her dynamite. For all of that, she didn't see the potential in the Mirror that Daniel had. She grabbed it and ran with it not because she thought it might be the way out of her moral and emotional dilemma but because she saw immediately that it could be their ticket off of Earth.

When she'd gathered what calmness she could, she said as though disappointed with his findings, "I guess it was extremely unlikely they would have found a disrupter in this universe...we'd never have had one ourselves if Jack hadn't accessed the Ancient database. No one here's had the urgent need to take that risk-besides which they are too leery of drawing attention to themselves to attempt contact with the Asgard."

She sighed and pushed her hair off of her forehead and then gave Daniel's mission the go with, "It's possible we could isolate the risks though." She tapped her finger on his list. "We could approach them in an alternate reality. If we found one with the Mirror still in situ on P3R-233, we could contact the Asgard from there without them knowing what reality or possibly even planet we were from," she shrugged again. "It's a possibility anyway, if we can't find something on our own."

"On our own?" he played along. "Against the Replicators? Not with what this world has to offer. We need the Asgard or the Wraith-"

"You're right. I'll talk to the admiral."

 _"The Wraith?" Landry sputtered in disbelief as though he hadn't already heard the preposterousness of that suggestion on the security tapes before she arrived in his office._

 _"Right," she said. "The Asgard then." He frowned at her knowing he'd just been manipulated but with a sigh he threw up a resigned hand and that at least went far easier than she had thought possible. Certainly easier than it would probably be to find a reality where the Asgard hadn't fallen to the Replicators long before...but, of course, that wasn't their purpose in arriving on the alternate P3R-233._

 _Convincing him that she and Daniel were both essential to the team going through the Mirror had been quite a bit more difficult. In the end, he had, however, thrown up both of his hands in resignation, and they joined the half-dozen naval officers that comprised GateTeam 1 and made their prison break._

Jon hadn't believed her. Not because he guessed her intentions, but because he understood her love of a challenge. Wherever she was heading that would take her out of contact for 'just a few hours, a day or two at the most' it was to work on something that wouldn't be an easy fix. He knew once she got her teeth into it...well, they might be lucky if she made it home on time after all.

Still he tried, like he always did, not to let her know how much he hated this part of their life together. He smiled as though she could hear it in his voice and said, "Don't forget to call as soon as you get back so the boys don't worry."

"I won't," she assured him.

"And don't forget I love you." And she assured him that was something else she wouldn't forget, but she'd hung up long before he was ready to let her go.

She'd gotten sick after making that particular phone call, choking on those final unpalatable lies. Afterwards, she had cried in the echoing chill of the female officers head with her forehead pressed against the ungiving glass of the mirror until she had no tears left to cry. When she was done, she splashed cold water over her hot, flushed cheeks and rinsed the bile from her mouth.

And then because she had to go on living with herself a little longer, she called him again. Not to warn him; what good would it do for him to know what they were about to do? Not to soften her betrayal; what could she possibly say that would excuse or lessen her determination to destroy his world?

Not a thing, and she hadn't tried. Instead, she urged him to go to the boat. It was late in the year, and it had already been secured for the winter; the boys had school and practice; and he had work...she knew, she knew. But he should go to the boat she'd told him anyway and got off the line before she was forced to leave him with one more lie.

And what had he thought of that phone call? What had she expected him to think of it? Had he known then what she was telling him?

She had never been sure just how much of the situation he'd understood and guessed. Certainly, she'd never sat him down and explained any of it in detail, and he'd never demanded any answers after that night at McMurdo. He'd understood then much more than he should have, but had he understood he was the man with the short straw? That the two worlds were not compatible and as far as she would always be concerned his world would not be the last one standing?

She hoped he hadn't.

So why had she made that already deeply regretted call? Had she wanted him to know, wanted to end their life together with the truth there between them even if she couldn't say it? No, not if that meant him having to bear the pain of her rejection. She couldn't, not even for conscience sake, have intended that.

No, that last call had been all for herself. She'd made it in a moment of weakness. When the end came, she wanted to be able to picture the boys and him happy and together laughing in the boat. What she was about to do...she needed to picture them there.


	10. Splitting Reality

She acknowledged the commander of GateTeam 1, "Captain Eriksson." He nodded his head in her direction and ran a practiced eye over her and Daniel to make sure they were properly equipped for the mission. He'd been thoroughly briefed and was well aware they'd both been doing this a long time more than he had. Still, she respected that he wasn't taking anything for granted. His team milled about behind him and seemed as eager to begin the mission as she was herself.

There were a few last minute remarks from General Landry; good luck and God speed sort of stuff here before the troops. None of the "I don't trust you, Colonel...watch your step and remember you're only out there to do the job we've assigned you" she'd earlier received from him behind the Admiral's closed door or the "Watch her-don't let her out of your sight" she was relatively sure the Captain had received during his own private session with the General.

Landry, like so many of the military men who had met Daniel over the years, seemed to hold no suspicions about him. It wasn't just the missing limb either. She'd seen it happen many, many times before. It was a tactical advantage that Jack for whatever reason had rarely capitalized on, but one she intended to exploit to its fullest. Military minds didn't look on him as an asset. Instead they saw him as someone who would slow the mission down: a scholar, a civilian, a hindrance, and a responsibility.

And that was exactly how she wanted these men to continue to think about him, so with exaggerated care, she turned and checked Daniel's pack as though she didn't quite trust his own preparations. "You sure the leg is up to this?" she asked him in a soft voice intended to reach their teammates' ears.

He frowned at her in momentary dismay, and she avoided his eyes. She might be capable of using him, but it would never come easy. They'd talked about the pain, the frustration with the doctors and therapists and the prosthetic. But the leg itself-or the lack of it-and what that meant to him, that they had never discussed. As a friend, she'd tried to keep the door open if he ever needed to talk about it but she'd left it up to him. Professionally, as a team leader, she'd hoped that her silence on the subject would speak for itself. That he would understand that it wasn't an issue, that she knew he was still a capable and productive member of SG-1. That he had not been compromised or diminished as far as she was concerned.

She thought that was probably as important to him as she knew it would be to her, and that's why she wouldn't meet his gaze. Not waiting for him to fumble out an answer or protest, she patted his shoulder bracingly and turned back to the Captain. "We're as ready as we can be, Captain," she said and was happy to see Eriksson narrow his eyes at Daniel for a brief moment.

Admiral Forester of the SGC seemed content to let the Air Force General see off his troops. He'd spent only a few moments with her outside of the hours of briefings they'd both slogged through. He'd used them to offer his thanks for her part in Baal's defeat, and to ask in a mild, inoffensive way if she found the Navy's SGC to compare at all favorably with the Air Force's. If he questioned her loyalty he didn't feel it necessary to throw the fact in her face. She had liked what she'd seen of him, but she did not regret that she was about to destroy his apparent high opinion of her.

She had after that last phone call thrown off all regrets. Her decision had been made. It was the only decision she could make. More than that, it was the right one. She'd been trained to make hard choices, and regrets played no part in them. All her focus from here on out had to be on fulfilling her mission, doing what had to be done, acting like the Air Force Colonel she was. Maggie Clark/O'Neill had never existed and never would.

They'd already spent the time necessary to find a reality that opened up not to another SGC storage room or lab but the alien one on P3R-233. The mission called for them to transition through the Mirror to the abandoned planet and there locate a communication system capable of contacting the Asgard.

If there was such a system on P3R-233 it was news to her. Certainly the planet had before its destruction sent out a message that had reached all the way to Earth...but to the Asgard? Not unless they were insystem for one reason or another. But, there'd been enough of the truth in the story to sell it to the admirals and generals who'd okayed the mission. (Funny how this government that had sent them out to live their lives in deceit and dishonesty readily accepted their words and stories as the truth as though they did not know that there was no honor among thieves or truth among liars.)

The team secured the immediate vicinity and then spread out looking for equipment she'd described in great detail. Equipment which existed not even within her imagination. Almost immediately, Daniel 'tripped' in the dim lighting of their torches. He fell awkwardly in a heap near the base of the Mirror and stayed there. In the process, he damaged his prosthetic limb and proved she'd been crazy to insist he should be allowed on the mission. Worse he'd managed to turn off the remote as he went down so that they'd have to spend time searching not only for the communication system but also for their reality.

"I'm terribly sorry," he apologized earnestly. "I'm fine here. Just go ahead and find the comm system. I'll stay out of the way."

"Daniel," she protested. "You're hurt. We need to find our Earth and get you back. The mission can wait. Captain, we'll have to come back...chances are we still have time before the Replicators-"

One of the lieutenants interrupted her, "Surely, Captain, that's hardly necessary. The man says he's fine...it shouldn't take long to locate what we're looking for."

The captain looked to Commander Dyson, his second in command. "Begging the colonel's pardon, but if Dr. Johnson insists he is fine, we'd be wasting time we do not have to delay the mission, Sir. Rawlins and Cuhl can locate our reality and escort the doctor back to Earth while we continue on," the commander recommended.

"Right," the captain said decisively. Addressing the two lieutenants he said, "Rejoin us as soon as the doctor is safely back at the SGC."

Sam shook her head dejectedly at the order but did not persist in her attempt to get her friend the aid he needed. He winced as he rubbed his thigh and said, "I'll be all right. Don't worry about me."

"Spread out, men, let's get what we need and get out of here," Eriksson ordered. The men gave a chorus of 'aye, aye, Sir's and fanned out again while Rawlins and Cuhl began their task.

"Let me get him some Tylenol," Carter said before moving out to help with the search. Eriksson nodded his assent as he and his team moved out of the small storage room into the echoing chambers beyond it. She stripped off her pack and began to dig through it.

Both Rawlins, his head down fiddling with the remote, and Cuhl with his eyes peering into the dark rooms visible in the Mirror and ignoring what was going on around them fell with one shot of the Zat she produced from her pack. She tossed a second weapon to Daniel as soon as he had scrambled to his feet and they moved quickly and soundlessly together to follow the others out of the room.

The team's torches lit only small swatches of the large rooms and sent tall, eerie shadows skittering about them. Under their cover, she and Daniel moved into position and then she breathlessly reported into her radio, "Captain! We have incoming hostiles through the Mirror! We need back-" Daniel opened fire on the team members nearest the storage room. She waited a beat before taking down those farther on.

There had been no time or place where they could firm up or even formulate their plans, but there had been no need. Things could not have gone more smoothly.

"Let's grab our stuff and go," she said already moving back to the storage room where they'd left their packs along with Rawlins and Cuhl. She intended to be through the Gate and far away before anyone returned to consciousness.

"Wait, Sam," he said, and she paused in her hurry to hear what he had to say.

"It doesn't have to be this way, does it?" he asked. "All or nothing? Not with the Mirror."

"I don't understand," she said as she fumbled with her own torch to light his face enough to make out his features.

"Remember what you said back in my apartment?" She shook her head dumbly. There was a clock ticking away in her mind insisting that their time was limited unless she was prepared to risk injuring the members of the GateTeam. He knew all that. He also knew that she was indeed prepared to go even that far if he left her no alternative, so he rushed on, "About the alternate realities and how we couldn't really change them? Unless we went back in time there too, they'd continue on? They wouldn't be changed."

She shrugged her shoulders in apologetic incomprehension and started off once more towards their gear.

"Sam, think. We could find a reality so close to the one we've been stuck in...Jon and the boys-they could continue on." And finally what he was suggesting sunk in. She stumbled to a stop and threw an almost panicked look over her shoulder at him. "Couldn't they?" he asked.

She looked over the still forms of the men around her as though they held the answer to a question she couldn't even begin to formulate. Then she looked again at Daniel. "I don't know, Daniel. Maybe. It will take time...if we stay here-the GateTeam. If we go through the Gate, we take the chance they'll remove the Mirror and we'll lose it. We need to get them out of the way."

They worked rapidly to secure their fallen teammates before any of them had time to shake off the Zat's effects. Years before, she'd spent several frantic hours searching for Daniel here and knew exactly where there were a series of closet-like rooms which would make passable cells. By the time they'd locked the last of the team into solitary confinement, they could hear the muffled complaints of Rawlins and Cuhl as they fought their way back to consciousness. They left them to it while they went back to the Mirror.

"So," Daniel said as soon as they entered the room. "It will work, right?"

"It...it...in theory...it sounds like it might work. But I've got to think. Figure this out." She looked at him with the shadows of her doubts and fears hovering in her eyes. She'd worked hard to put all these soul-destroying what-ifs behind her and she was afraid to open the door to them again. But, if it was possible, if they could let both worlds live on, if Jon and the boys didn't have to be wiped out of existence...it would be worth every moment of torment she went through analyzing the possibility.

"Okay, you figure. I'll see how close of a reality we can find," Daniel said. She watched him begin to dial in various realities, but her mind was not on the assorted dark storerooms that flitted in and out of their view. It was a painful, dangerous thought, and she knew she was the last person who could be trusted to trace its logic and potential and come up with an objective, honest appraisal.

Not to mention, the whole who's really who question that arose anytime these sorts of things intersected.

If they saved Jack and the world in this universe they were in right now (or any of them for that matter) hers were truthfully still lost in another, but for all practical, understandable, perceivable purposes? The Carter and Daniel who were rewritten into the reverting timeline would never know the difference. Their world would be righted and would continue on as it would have if Baal had never shaken its foundations. That was, had to be, her primary purpose.

And Jon and the boys...if in one reality or another, they let time go on in its unnatural course then at least in that one reality the man and boys she loved would continue to live on. Even if it wasn't the actual man and boys she herself had left just the day before.

"Daniel, I don't know if you can find one as close as it will have to be," she started to say doubtfully because she knew her own resolve to right the timeline, but she couldn't know anyone else's. Not even another Carter's. She would never entrust her world and Jack's life to someone who might at the last moment choose to stay where they were, choose to live out what time they had with Jon and not rock the boat, not take the chance that their fix-it job might not be successful. And even as she knew her own resolve, she knew how tempting that choice was.

She started to warn Daniel, but she didn't finished. Because the image that he pulled up in the Mirror then was so identical to the very moment she was living that she could see the words falter on her counterparts lips at the same time they did on her own.

She stared at her reflection in the Mirror and knew if Daniel's idea had any merit at all, it could be taken a step farther. If they could split realities and save both worlds in doing so...she met her own gaze through the Mirror and together they licked their lips and frowned at one another. If they could do that then one of the two to them staring at one another's wide eyed, white faces could stay behind.

There was no need for both of them to disappear in the mists of time. One could go back in time and save their world and the other could stay in the alternate reality with Jon and the boys and be there to help save their world the next time it was threatened. As it was certain to be if they were able to remove it from time's clutches.

And why wouldn't it work? A parallel reality arose at every fork of the road. Cam had created the world she was gazing into through the Mirror when he'd refused her pleas to join them after all. At least she thought that was a safe assumption, because his curious gaze from the Carter standing next to him on his side of the Mirror to her own face was the only difference she could spot between the two realities.

There might be more, but the important ones, the vital ones...she and Daniel there prepared to do what had to be done, no hesitation, no uncertainties just as they were. These mirrored selves had faced the same choices and came to the same conclusions or they would not be here in this split moment of time...both Daniels needing a haircut, absently rubbing a tired hand over their aching thigh, staring curiously at one another; both Carters, dressed identically, running a hand through tousled hair, locking eyes in dawning realization and recognition.

Together they nodded their heads in acknowledgement. They'd made the same decisions, lived with the same regrets and fears, and chosen the same path. It was nothing in either of them that had placed them on opposite sides of the Mirror. They were the same person. If she trusted herself, she could trust the woman in the mirror. There was no reason for one of them to not stay behind in the preserved timeline. Not if this whole crazy idea of Daniel's worked.

The thought had always been that one or more of the three of them trapped in this misbegotten timeline would go back in the past and rewrite history to what it should be. That very act would effectively wipe out whoever didn't go back in time while the group that did would have to live their lives out back there (holding their breath and stepping very carefully in order to avoid additional damage to the timeline, of course). Either way none of them would be going back to the world they were determined to save. They died in their own pasts or they died when the timeline was rewritten.

And for one of them that was unchanged regardless of what hocus-pocus they could accomplish with Daniel's mirror trick. But, the second group couldn't go back in time and change a thing. Not if their purpose was to preserve the altered timeline and let the people and lives on that world that shouldn't be continue. And if that was the case then the Carter, Daniel, and Cam of that reality could live on as well. There was no need for them to die in their past and no possibility of them being rewritten by a timechange that wasn't going to happen.

All the soul-searching and guilt to bring her to this spot had been necessary so she could look into her counterpart's soul and know and attest that whichever one of them went or stayed the world to which they owed everything and the man whom they both loved more than any other would go on. They were each committed to the cause, but if at the same time one of them could somehow not betray the man and boys in a boat out somewhere on a quiet lake in Minnesota, then that made the task immeasurably easier for whichever one would see it through. And if one of them could benefit by staying, neither one of them was so foolish as to throw away that possibility.

"Okay," both of her said to their Daniels. "This could work..."

Cam stood on the one side of the Mirror and said to no one in particular, "What do you figure they did to me?" But he might as well have been absent from both realities for all the attention anyone paid him.

"Okay. I didn't think quite far enough ahead, I'm afraid," the Daniels said in unison to their respective Sams while staring at their counterparts in the Mirror. "How's this going to work?"

Both Sams put an open hand up to their mouth in thought before answering, "We switch over, unless..." and for the first time they took their eyes from the Mirror and looked at the man beside them, "...unless you don't want to go on. If," and here they bit their lip and threw a guilty glance at his leg, "You don't have to go...I could go on myself. You could let time..."

Both Daniels watched the Sam in the Mirror and avoided the eyes of the woman next to them. "Right," they said with a sigh. It was not a new thought to either of the men. Sam, when she'd thrown off the most of her depression and started to live again, had hauled him out of the deep well of despair behind her. Her focus and determination had opened up the doors of usefulness and purpose to him once more.

But, he hadn't found the happiness she had. He'd never scrounged up the courage or recklessness-whichever it would have been-to make that call to Janet. And he'd seen too clearly Sam's pain and fears to cast his net in less troubled waters. So, he'd long thought that when it came to it and they'd be forced to give up their lives here, however satisfactory or unsatisfactory they might be, and go back in time to do whatever it would take to right the timeline...well, he'd thought, if it wasn't a two man job, he'd let her go on alone. He'd let time wipe him out and start over with another Daniel.

And he wasn't sure that wasn't still what he wanted. But, it was far too early to tell at this point. He didn't even know how she planned to get back in time, let alone what she'd have to do back there to get the job done. She might very well need him.

"I'm going," both of him said, and the Sams smiled up at them with tired relief that they didn't have the time or energy to disguise.

Cam frowned at the interchanges going on around him and said, "What about me?"

"I thought you were in on this," the Carter beside him said frowning over at him and for the first time no longer mirroring Sam.

"That's not what I meant-I told you I'd go along with this and I'm not backing out again. But, I mean if you go through to their reality and they come through to ours...where does that leave me?"

"That's not quite how it's going to work," the other Sam told him as she and her Daniel emerged from the Mirror to join them.

He coughed to cover the start she'd given him. "So like..."

"We're not trading places," his Carter explained to him.

He made a 'mmhmm' sort of sound and both Carters gave him an understanding smile and opened their mouths to give him an explanation, realized they would both be doing the same thing, and neither one continued on. He cleared his throat and turned to the woman who'd traveled to this world with him for an explanation.

With a cautious glance at her counterpart as though for permission, she complied, "It wouldn't gain us anything. We'll get a lot farther if we put our heads together and work things out first."

"Really?" he asked with the doubt clear in his voice.

"Of course," said the woman who hadn't traveled to this world with him. "In the end, we'll have to decide whose reality remains as it is and whose reverts back..." her explanation petered out as Cam strode over to his pack and rifled through it.

"What are you doing?" the Daniels both asked him curiously.

"I'm taking care of what I can see is going to become a very big problem before this is all over," he said producing a stick of the chalk they carried in their kits for marking trails. Brandishing it, he asked, "Who's first."

Both Daniels shook their heads, the Carters shrugged, and he rolled his eyes at them all.

"Just what are you intending to mark us with?" one of the Daniel's asked.

Taking that as a sign, Cam reached out and marked a large X on his right sleeve under his SGC patch. "How about that?" he asked examining his work.

"Very original," the Daniel said looking at his handiwork. His Carter said nothing but held out her own arm to receive her X.

"Do you feel better now?' the unmarked Daniel asked him.

"Very. Now," he said to the other Carter, "you were saying..."

"I was saying, we have a lot of work to do and I think we need to get started. I don't feel comfortable leaving Gate Team 1 locked up without even the simplest of facilities and only a limited amount of food and water." She didn't need to verify that these people had their own set of imprisoned teammates as they could all hear the muffled indignant calls coming from the outer room.

"So then?" both Daniel's prompted, and they put their collective heads together to find solutions to their two main problems.

If both timelines were to continue, then the Replicator problem they'd pretty much ignored and reckoned irrelevant had to be considered significant and worthy of their attention. And there was still the issue of how to get back into the past and stop Baal from losing the StarGate.

Neither problem seemed too daunting initially. After all they had instant access to an infinite number of realities some of which were bound to have disrupter technology, the Pegasus Replicator virus, or a working weapon at Dakara already modified to take out Replicators...none of which either of their realities had thanks to Baal's little excursion into the past. And surely in one of those multitudes of worlds there was a time machine or passageway they could use more successfully than Malikai had the Ancient machine on P4X-639. Somewhere, somehow Baal had found one...surely they could as well. There was also the possibility of locating a Puddle Jumper equipped with a time device along with someone with the Ancient gene willing to ferry them back through time.

All in all the possibilities seemed endless. So buoyed with hope and anxious to complete their mission, they ensured they would recognize their respective ways through the Mirrors home and began a treasure hunt across a myriad of realities.

They found relatively quickly that they'd been overly optimistic. There were in theory infinite universes but the great majority had never seen the development of the Ancients. The great majority of those that had had been destroyed by one cataclysmic cosmic event or another in the past million years or so. Very few of those that had survived thus far had managed to keep their quantum Mirrors (if they had had them to start with) intact and functioning...and on and on it went until the choices were much, much more limited than it would have seemed possible.

Which wasn't to say their task was impossible, but it was more involved that they'd anticipated and much longer than the GateTeam members locked in their solitary closets with only the water and rations from their packs to see them through found comfortable.

And at some point, it became apparent that Replicators were drawn to the energy signature of the Mirrors. The Replicator problem took on an unexpected urgency about then.

Thankfully, it was not a transdimensional problem. The Mirrors on the various worlds they acsessed and/or visited were not in use long enough to attract the unnatural creatures. But the Mirror they were using as their base of operations sent out its enticing energy signature throughout that particular reality. The Replicators responded promptly and in great numbers.

When they first heard the eerie, metallic clicking of thousands of mechanical insects arriving in the outer chamber, only the marked Carter and Cam were there.

"Tell me that's not what I think it is," Cam said.

"I wish I could," Carter said. "Listen, these Replicators have probably never faced an attack from humans...they probably will not see us as a threat-"

"Or Eriksson and his men?"

"As long as no one starts firing on them, they should just pass us by." That 'as long as' didn't go far when it became apparent that the bugs were after the Mirror itself. If they lost it they'd lose any hope of escaping this reality and making any difference in either of the worlds they'd left behind. They had no choice but to defend the Mirror at all cost.

Though they didn't know it at the time, the others had just successfully procured a disrupter from an SGC which had already decisively dealt with its bug problem and was willing to share with a couple of needy realities. If they had known of the pitched battle being fought on the other side of the Mirror, they would have rushed back to save the day.

As it was, they were much too late by the time they'd verified that this particularly cooperative reality had lost its Puddle Jumping Time machine in the distant past of Ancient Egypt, and its Jack O'Neill had been so spectacularly unimpressed with Malikai's experiments that he'd blown their time machine to bits. They said their thanks and received their 'good luck and God speed' from a General Hammond with a full head of white hair and Gated back to that reality's P3R-233.

Through the Mirror, they watched in shocked horror as Cam fell under the Replicator attack. They rushed through the portal with the disrupter to rescue a bruised and bleeding Carter from the same fate just in time. Shaking with shock and grief she wept in Daniel's arms while the other Carter did what she could to treat her wounds. His counterpart who'd taken just a fraction of a second longer in reaching her side than his alternate, was left standing ineffectively on the sidelines. He placed a comforting hand on her shoulder for a brief moment and then turned to check on GateTeam 1.

"He didn't want to come," she said. "I shouldn't have asked him."

"You couldn't have known," Daniel murmured.

"Then how come you didn't bring yours?"

He sent a questioning look toward his Carter. She was studiously intent on cleaning a particularly nasty looking gash and left him to answer as best he could. "I don't really know. He'd made it clear he was done with us after Antarctica...I never-well, I feel awful about it now, but I never tried to see if he would change his mind."

"Don't," she said. "Feel awful, I mean. I should never have brought him here. He'd still be alive if I hadn't talked him in to coming."

The other Carter reluctantly joined their conversation. "No. He made his own decision. He knew the risks and he chose to accept them. Our Cam...I called him. I begged him to come with us, make a difference-he wouldn't. You didn't drag him out here to die; he made that choice himself." And there was little to say after that.

JSJSJSJSJSJSJSJSJ

The men locked in their cramped and lonely cells had had their own experiences of the Replicator attack. The creepy, metallic sounds would haunt their nights for years to come, but secured behind locked doors with no Replicator-enticing technology to draw the automatons to them, they survived the attack unscathed.

They were still in the dark about the original attack that had landed them in their cells and could only guess at what sort of battle they'd just heard. By then, they'd been confined for most of a day and well into the night. They'd spent a good deal of that time, fighting to dismantle doors or knock holes in walls and shouting muffled questions and plans back and forth. They'd learned very little from one another. Their whole team was present and accounted for which was certainly something to be thankful about.

But they'd had no word from either of the Colonels or Dr. Johnson which concerned Captain Eriksson considerably. The doctor, incapacitated from his fall, and Colonel O'Neill had both been in the Mirror room when the original attack had occurred. Colonel Mitchell had been only meters away from the door. Eriksson was fairly certain that he had responded to O'Neill's call for back-up which placed him right there as well.

His two men from the Mirror room had survived that attack uninjured but neither of them was at all clear about what had happened. It was altogether possible that the three members of the defunct SG-1 had been lost in the attack. The general might shake off the loss with a 'good riddance', but the admiral would be extremely displeased.

More than once as they had prepared for this mission, Forrester had emphasized how valuable he believed these three to be. "Mark my words, Captain," he'd said, "Earth needs these folks. It's not every world that is given fair warning about what's out there. They not only know what we're likely to run into, they've survived it. The folks wanting to shut them out are fools. Bring them back safely, Eriksson. Baal was just the beginning. We need these folks if we are going to survive out there."

Eriksson had looked around the dusty, abandoned rooms and felt sure there was nothing threatening in them. Except for possibly SG-1 themselves. He hated to admit it but he'd been more concerned with the general's suspicions than the admiral's concerns. As a result, he'd made the job of whoever had come through that Mirror easy. He might as well have handed SG-1 over to them himself.

SJSJSJSJSJSJSJ

Daniel, walking quietly to avoid them hearing his echoing footsteps, listened to their anxious calls checking on the welfare of one another before he turned back to his own shaken teammates.

"Eriksson and the others seem okay," he reported from the doorway, and the silent group in the room raised their shattered faces to acknowledge him. He winced at the pain and sorrow in their gazes.

Except for the months they'd spent together in Antarctica, he and Cam had seen nothing of each other over their years of exile. Neither had made the slightest effort to keep in touch with each other before then or after. And truthfully, even in Antarctica they'd spent very little time together besides those Sam had orchestrated or the job had dictated. He'd been more angry than hurt when Cam had bailed out on them then. And it hadn't occurred to him to ask their old teammate to reconsider joining them when their long wait had drawn to a close. The shame he and his counterpart shared over that lack of concern and interest on their part mingled with their sorrow over Cam's death.

As for the Sams, it was one more command decision to weigh on their soul.

He frowned at the both of them. Neither was turned where he could see which wore Cam's X, but that was no longer a problem. His Sam had been ravaged by the bugs; her body and uniform bore the marks of that attack. She was also the one who'd convinced Cam to leave the safety of civilian life and journey with them to his death, and she couldn't have looked any guiltier for it if she'd shot him herself. But, the other Sam looked no less stricken, no less responsible.

And that he thought exemplified the spirit that had put all four of them in this room, attempting to deny fate and time, accepting the responsibility of righting what very well couldn't be righted. It was why they had not settled for second best in the altered timeline. They had responsibilities to those they'd left behind and to one another. And they were unable or unwilling to let them go.

Only Cam had found his new life a satisfactory substitute for the real thing. Cam. Well, that, he thought, decided which reality would continue on and which would be returned to the right timeline. Cam lived happily on in the other Sam and Daniel's world. That world would be left to continue on and their own would vanish in time. That was the decision he knew they would all come to in the end. Their guilt was too heavy for them to choose otherwise.

He'd misjudged only one thing in his train of thought.

His Sam fought against the painkillers her counterpart had doped her with and said, "We uh..." She shook her head then, slowly and purposely letting the physical pain the movement caused her to override her emotional suffering. Forcing herself to put that aside and get on with the mission, and pulling the rest of them along with her. Just as Cam had insisted she do in that frozen ship after Jack had been killed. She restarted, this time with the control she'd lacked the first time, "We managed to get what we need."

"What is it?" the other one asked. "Did the Replicators get it?" He watched them both in a sort of detached fascination. Their military training had taught them the necessity of pushing to the side everything but what mattered to the mission, and experience had showed them it was at times essential. But it was Jack who had taught them how to do it. He'd perfected that particular skill to an art form. Watching them, he couldn't help but see his lost friend, and it made him more determined than ever to see this thing through.

The drugs slowed and slurred her actions, but she shook her head 'no' and fumbled in one of her many vest pockets to pull out a carefully folded paper. The others all frowned at the smudges of blood staining it, but she didn't seem to notice them. She held the paper out to the other Sam. "It's the coordinates to Baal's time machine..."

The other Sam carefully unfolded the paper and stared numbly at the symbols on it. "Baal's time machine?"

"Yes. The reality we just returned from? The Tok'ra had discovered Baal's plans and blown it up before he could use it...but that's the planet it was on. You need to go there, figure it out, and fix things once and for all."

"And what about you?"

Her eyes flickered to the bloody paper and she gave a small shrug. "I don't think I'm going anywhere."

"Okay," her counterpart said with no sign she resented the full weight of the mantle of responsibility that had just landed with a heavy thud on her shoulders again. And with no indication, its presence settled the course of her life. The X'd Daniel had been wrong. His was the reality which would continue on giving Jon and the boys a chance to live out their lives. But it wasn't a life that Cam would have a chance to enjoy. The other reality with its still living Cam was the one that would be rewritten.

In that brief moment, it was determined which of the two women would go on as Colonel Samantha Carter and which would become Colonel Maggie O'Neill. It was a very significant moment though neither acknowledged it.

"Did you learn anything else about the machine?" Carter asked.

"No," O'Neill answered her.

"Okay," Carter said standing up. "You've got the disrupter. If any of the Replicators are left out there...you should be able to handle them."

"How will you explain what happened here?" the unmarked Daniel asked the injured woman both because he wanted to know and because he wanted it understood that he would not be staying behind to help sell the story, whatever it was.

The other Daniel answered for her, "What's to explain? It's obvious she's survived an attack. Cam and I didn't."

"Daniel," she said bleakly.

He shook his head. "I'm sorry, Sam. They might need the back up. You'll have family...you'll be okay without us." She shook her head in denial, but they'd both known his continued existence in her world had never been decided. "The Replicators ate through some of the packing crates out in the main room. I guess they must have had some tasty technology inside them that they couldn't resist sampling on their way. But you can say that's where we were being held. When we heard the Replicators attacking whoever was out here, we broke out afraid they were coming for us next.

As we tried to find a place to hide, we found the disrupter...it must have been one of the artifacts or maybe our captors lost it? How could you possibly know? You'd been unconscious or locked in that box the whole time. Anyway, by then it was too late for the bad guys, and for Cam and me." She looked uncertainly at him, and he said, "Look at you. We pull the bandages back off, snip the stitches...you stagger in there to release them, and collapse. By the time the doctors let anyone start pestering you for answers...you're going to be the hero of the hour. Trust me."

"But what about you?" she asked softly.

He shrugged and stole a line from Jack. "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."

Before the pain meds started to wear off, they undid all of Carter's attempts at first aid. The Daniels both gingerly helped Maggie to her feet. She swayed there between them trying to stay conscious and upright. Carter put her hands on her shoulders to steady her, and Maggie looked into her eyes seeking confirmation that she could trust her to continue their battle with time. The resolve was so clear in her counterpart's eyes that there was no need for words to pass between them.

She nodded her head in acknowledgement and said, "Thank you." Neither of them were going to end up back where they both wanted to be, but she by default was going to be left to love and be loved by Jon and the boys. She would live on and enjoy a life stolen from time. Carter would pay the price for that life, and they both knew it.

"Just be happy. Don't waste this opportunity wallowing in guilt or regret, okay?" Carter asked her.

"Okay," she agreed. She wasn't sure that would really be possible, but she meant to give it her best shot. It would be different when she went back; her duty to her world fulfilled and her loss of Jack final and irrevocable. In time, happiness might be something she could once again fully experience and not just a memory.

Carter turned back then to open a Mirrorway to the P3R-233 where another GateTeam banged in frustration against their cell doors; and Maggie allowed the Daniels to help her into the main room. They both hugged her carefully and left her leaning desperately against the door to one of the make-do cells. She waited a few minutes to give them time to reach the Mirror, and then called in a ragged, trembling voice that she did not need to fake, "Captain Eriksson? Are you here?"


	11. Tangled Realities

Baal's time machine was a marvel of engineering that she would have liked to take apart and put back together again in order to learn all of its intricate secrets. She settled for just figuring out how it worked and what it did because she wanted even more to put this long, unending mission behind her once and for all. It was time.

The Daniels wondered around like stray dogs while she studied the machine. There was little here to interest them. That troubled her. Once she understood Baal's weapon and how to use it, they'd be faced with the choice of staying in this time and letting themselves be overwritten, returning to the alternate reality and making a place for themselves, or joining her in the past. It wasn't a choice she could make for them, but life hadn't beaten her so far down that she didn't wish a happy ending for them.

And for herself? The only conclusion to this whole mess that would make her happy was knowing that she'd been successful in stopping Baal from striking a blow with this time machine. So even though she would have liked to find a happy ever after for at least one of the Daniels, she didn't go looking for one. Soon after beginning the search for a solar flare that would send them back to the late 1930's, she found it anyway. Or at least the tantalizing possibility of one.

"Daniel," she said quietly and both of them looked up from where they'd plopped themselves sometime before when they'd grown tired of wandering the cavern. "I...uh...I've found something."

"Yeah?" they both asked climbing awkwardly to a stand and coming to curiously hover over her shoulders. "The right flare?"

"I guess that will depend on what you want to do with it."

"As in?"

"I can send you back ten years, Daniel." She waited expectantly for one of them to make the connection.

"As in ten years...you can send us back to Sha're?" one of them said in a stunned whisper.

"Why not?" the other said. "Ten years ago in this timeline, and who knows how many others, the original mission to Abydos never happened. She very well could be back there."

She didn't look at them as they exchanged looks and came to whatever decision they would come to. "There's only a short window of opportunity. You have to decide soon," she told them. "But you both could go you know-once you're in the past, you can Gate to the Mirror and both of you can find realities where she is still there."

"No," one of them said in a resolute voice, "you might need help back in 1939. Neither one of us is going to send you on without any backup. I'll stay, and he'll go." As that was more than she'd dared hope, she didn't protest.

"All right," she said. "Be ready to go through as soon as the Gate opens." She dialed in the coordinates, and he put a hand on her shoulder in farewell. She reached up and squeezed it.

"Take care," he said.

"You, too." The Gate kawhoosed open then, and he shuffled off to a future ten years in the past.

"Aren't you even curious which one of us left?" the remaining man asked from behind her shoulder.

Whatever she would have answered was lost when the Gate reactivated. "We have incoming!" she shouted as they both scrambled for their weapons. They hunkered beyond the scanty cover of the machine's control console and watched as several Jaffa marched through the Gate.

"Teal'c," Daniel breathed in a whisper of recognition and surprise near her ear. He was right, but it was not the Teal'c that had fought beside them on SG-1 for ten years. This was the warrior, the loyal servant of the gods, and he was not pleased to find them there. There was an uncomfortable standoff between the Jaffa and the two humans.

It ended abruptly when transport rings appeared on one of the walkways beyond the machine. Sam and Daniel had both drawn in one last breath of air as they prepared to face a two-pronged attack, but when Teal'c's Jaffa opened fire it was at the newcomers. Throwing themselves to the narrow pathway at the base of the control console, they struggled to make sense of their predicament. They were pinned down in the cross fire of a battle between opposing Jaffa forces, and when one side emerged victorious...

She tried to push herself up to a stand, but Daniel pulled her back down. "You'll get killed!" he hissed at her.

"We've got to keep trying to find a flare! We'll never have this chance again!" she shouted at him trying to shake off his grip.

"Forget it," he told her. "Wait."

"No!" she shouted and tore herself from his hold. She kept as low as she could and still see the controls and machine readout. That wasn't low enough.

The staff blast hit her right side, tearing through her flack jacket and leaving behind it a wide swath of burned and bleeding skin. She held onto the console for dear life to keep the force of it from throwing her off the walkway and into the deep yawning cavern below. She fought against the shock of the injury to focus on the readout she'd just seen when she'd taken the hit.

The right flare was building up on a star 150,000 light years away. Well, not quite the right flare, but as close as they were going to get. Fighting vertigo and weakness, she dialed the Gate. Then, she collapsed down beside Daniel. He crouched over her trying to stanch the blood oozing from her side, but she shook him off.

"You've got to go. Get to the Gate. Stop Baal."

"Sam..." he began but she didn't let him finish.

"You'll have to wait a bit...three years. Give you time to figure out a way to stop him. Go." She motioned toward the Gate, and he recognized the futility of doing anything but obeying.

"I love you, Sam,"* he told her and then he scurried awkwardly away from her and toward the Gate. A good number of Teal'c's Jaffa had pushed past them to engage the opposing forces at close range so the way was clearer than it had been earlier. The clanging sounds of the opening StarGate were swallowed up by the sounds of the battle, and the kawhoosh caught most of the remaining warriors by surprise.

That left only two in Daniel's way. He rushed them with his pistol firing and one of them fell to his charge. He shambled past the other and dived head first into the Gate.

She watched his feet disappear into the swirling blue of the wormhole and waited to disappear.

SJSJSJSJSJSJ

The return of Gate Team 1 and the sole surviving member of SG-1 was a somber homecoming. The mission had been successful in that they had fulfilled the mission objective to find something with which to combat the Replicators. But, their losses had been high, perhaps too high. The debriefings were extensive and yielded less than satisfactory conclusions. Too little was known about who had captured the team or what their purpose had been; and even less on why the Replicators had massed on that one planet. It was grudgingly accepted that they would never really know what had happened on that desolate world.

No one took her innocence for granted. She spent a good deal of her recovery under suspicion...no phone calls, no outside contacts. Just questions and more questions until finally her name was cleared. Daniel had been right. Once they had allowed her to convince them she was not guilty of whatever had happened out there, she was the hero of the hour.

After expressing his condolences, General Landry came as close as she supposed he ever would to expressing his apologies as well. She accepted them humbly without any bitterness; after all he'd been right to distrust her. Every suspicion he'd harbored had been right on. He had no need to apologize.

And neither did she though he wouldn't ever have seen it that way if things had not taken such an unexpected turn. They'd both served their worlds well. And they were both experienced officers enough to know sometimes that was just as distasteful as not. This was definitely one of those times. She convinced Dr. Frasier, the SGC's new CMO, she was fit for travel and went home.

SJSJSJSJSJSJ

He stretched his long legs over the railing and looked up at the stars. He thought that was where it would come. Whatever it was that had caused her to call him and say without preamble or explanation, "Take the boys to the lake, Jon."

There'd been no urgency in her voice only resignation so he'd understood whatever was coming wasn't something he could fight or outrun. There was nothing he could do protect his sons.

And he'd also understood she didn't believe whatever she was trying to do would save them either. She hadn't sent them to the boat for safety but because it would give her a measure of peace to think of them out on the lake with the waves gently rocking them. If whatever she was attempting failed, she wanted the end to come for them there where they'd enjoyed so many good times.

She had had nothing else to say. Just, "Take the boys to the lake, Jon," followed by a tight, "I love you all," and then she'd been gone. He hadn't wasted any time in packing up the few things they might need on the boat and heading out. Travis had protested missing practice but the younger boys had been more than excited to miss a day or two of school.

He'd fallen asleep watching the sky that first night and every night since. He wondered how long she expected him to sit out here waiting for the end and if he'd see it coming or if would sneak up on him. It was later in the fall than he usually took the boat out, but the weather had held. The night sky was clear and bright with stars as he watched it quietly while the boys slept in their bunks.

He thought if he woke up in the morning, it would be time to take their chances in the city. When you took three months' vacation time every year to start with, there were only so many days you could afford to miss until you didn't have a job at all. He'd been pushing the limits already this year with the two trips he'd made to Antarctica to sit in that chair. The 'consultation fee' he'd received in compensation helped, but even with Maggie's paychecks supplementing his own, he wasn't planning on taken an early retirement.

And then there was school and practice and the piles of library books stacked under chairs and thrown in the corners of rooms all over his house accruing daily overdue fines. And there was still Charlie's visit coming up and all the extra cleaning and shopping to be done for it. If the world was still here tomorrow, he'd have to rejoin it. He couldn't wait around on the end forever.

He must have nodded off because the next time he was aware she was there watching him sleep.

"Hey," he said.

She smiled at him. Not with a big 'we just saved the world' grin which he thought didn't bode well. Just a 'hello, there' sort of smile. And not a particularly happy one at that.

"So," he said when she didn't volunteer any information, "what's up?"

"The weather's great, and Charlie isn't coming for a few more days...how about a late boating trip?"

"Aren't you supposed to be reporting for duty in the morning?"

"I have a couple of days' medical leave," she said. He frowned at her but she wasn't volunteering any farther information so he knew he'd have to come at that one in a roundabout way.

"What about work and school?" he asked because they had been on his mind when he'd fallen asleep, not because he cared a thing about them at the moment. The real question was why hadn't she called and let him know she was still alive? Why hadn't she called to tell him he could quit sitting out here in the chilly night air waiting for the end of the world? He didn't bother asking because he didn't think he'd get a truthful answer if he did.

"I doubt they'll disappear in the next few days."

"Sure about that?"

She smiled again and this time he could see the relief behind it, "Sure as I can be." And that, he thought, would have to do him.

SJSJSJSJSJSJ

The sounds of the battle disappeared before she did. She lay in a triumphant, bloody heap and heard Teal'c's voice claiming victory against whomever he'd been battling.

"I die free," he called out. So do I, she thought. Daniel would stop Baal; their battle with time was over. She'd done all she could for both of the worlds she'd sworn to serve and for both of the men she loved. There was nothing more for her to do but wait for the end. She'd fought the good fight, lived with integrity and all that. There was no shame in letting time wipe her out of existence.

A flash and a concussive blast flared through the cavern. It buffeted her, but she was for the most part shielded by the control console. The air filled with the charred, bitter smell of burning flesh. She coughed painfully as it gagged her.

Time was taking its own sweet time in wiping her out of existence.

Wearily she struggled to her feet. Blood ran hot and thick down her side. She thought if time didn't hurry up, death would beat it to the punch. She clung to the console a moment, staring through the smoke at the dead bodies strewn over the pathways.

She looked numbly at the Gate symbols under her arms and suddenly this was not where she wanted it to end.

She'd go back, back to where it had all begun. Back to where she'd lost him. When time overtook her that was where she wanted to be.

She disconnected the time machine and dialed the numbers with a hand that was far from steady. Only her strength of will moved her up the walkway, past the remains of the Jaffa caught in the earlier kawhoosh, and finally into the open Gate on a one way trip to oblivion.

Somehow, though that wasn't where she emerged. As she stumbled out of the Gate, she had the briefest glimpse of the members of SG-1 spread out before her on the Gate platform. And at its base, looking up to see her come through—Jack, with a pleased grin on his face, his weapon cradled in his arms like a prized possession, and no spreading blood stain on his shoulder. Whole and unharmed. Alive.

"Whoa!" Daniel said, reaching out an arm and keeping her from falling on her face. She clung to him a second in bewilderment and awakening wonder. He helped her get her feet under her and asked, "Sam, something wrong?" She fought for breath in the sudden absence of the pain and weakness that had assailed her on the other side of the Gate and for understanding in the confusion of finding herself just as whole and unharmed as Jack here in this place among these people.

"You all right there, Carter?" Mitchell called casually, unconcerned over his shoulder as he moved away. Unconcerned because there was nothing alarming in her appearance to make any of them think she'd done anything more than to stumble going into the Gate. Her clothes and weapons matched theirs. Her clothes, her hair, everything about her matched up to how she'd looked stepping onto this planet two and a half years before.

Somehow, someway she hadn't been wiped out of time but merged back into it. She had the memories of the other timeline, of Jon and the boys, of choosing to save not just her world but both of them, of the Daniels, of the Replicator attack and losing Cam, of it all. Yet physically she was the Sam Carter who had arrived through this very Gate that long ago day.

It had to be the Gate...somehow being in transit when time reverted had kept her from disappearing with the altered timeline. Again. Like it had the three of them when this whole nightmare had begun. But, this time...something else had to have gone on.

Something in the Gate design must have recognized her particles and melded them with the rewritten Carter's. Even after all these years there was much still to be learned about the Gate's capabilities and fail-safes. Two individuals demolecularized in the system at the same time with the same signatures, same DNA, same personality matrixes, and same destination...the Gate might recognize a paradox and reconstitute them as one-using certain criteria such as the stronger physical signature to pick and choose what would be saved and what would be lost in the melding. If that were the case, it would go without saying that it would pick the mind with the most data as the default.

That was the best she could come up with at the moment. It might not bear up to close inspection, but it would do as a working hypothesis. Certainly she couldn't argue its plausibility because here she was where she'd started and he was standing at the base of the platform looking up at her with a welcoming grin.

"Sam?" Daniel asked quietly in her ear. He was not yet alarmed but growing concerned in her continued silence. Then he followed her gaze, gave a muffled 'oh' of comprehension, and with a smile and a shake of his head, he nimbly descended the stairs two at a time.

She couldn't take her eyes off of the man at the bottom of those steps. He was alive and unharmed and his grin only widened the longer it took her to find her voice. "You coming?" he called up to her, and she could tell he was delighted she wasn't doing a better job of hiding her joy in seeing him.

"General," Mitchell said in acknowledgement as he came to a stop beside him, and he 'Coloneled' him back while still watching her. Mitchell turned to scowl up at her and say, "Carter?"

"I'm coming," she said to both of them and forced her legs to move.

"Good. Let's go," Mitchell said striding off.

"What's his hurry?" Jack asked as he soundly thumped Daniel's back and clasped Teal'c's forearm in greeting.

"First extraction ceremony," Daniel said succinctly, and Jack gave an 'Ahh' of comprehension. She reached him then, and she could see the calculation going through his mind. What were the odds anyone here would care if he skipped the 'colonel' and went right to the hug and kiss? As always decorum won out as they both had known it would. He'd never reveal a weakness of that magnitude before the Tok'ra who he still viewed as more enemy than ally even after all the years they'd fought the Goa'uld together.

He nodded his head at her in a silent promise that there'd be time for that later after the debriefings and behind closed doors. They'd spent too many years practicing this dance to trip it up here...even though he was smart enough and she was experienced enough to know one day there might not be time for that after all.

"Ready?" he asked her.

"Yes, Sir," she responded even though she wasn't. She was still trying to come to grips with this unexpected reality. She should not be here. Only, of course, she should. That had after all been what these last few days had been all about. Getting back to this point in time, getting back to make sure he didn't die here by Baal's hand.

But she should not be walking beside him knowing what she knew, remembering what she did. Knowing that his blood had soaked into the soil of this planet, that he'd died here and there'd been nothing she could do to save him, that they'd already lived out this particular piece of time once before. She should not be here.

But she was. And though she should have informed him then that she'd been through a time shift, should have requested permission to go back to Earth and make her report, should have followed protocol and spoken up she didn't. Instead she grinned at him and walked beside him along the dusty path to the ceremony. There'd be time for that later as well. After she'd seen Baal's slimy existence spilled out into the dirt of this world.

He'd fidgeted and fussed through the hours of singing just like he had before. She wasn't fooled, he was as pleased as she was to be standing there side by side sneaking hungry glances at each other like school kids. Well, he was as pleased as she'd been that first time. He couldn't even begin to be as pleased as she was this time around.

Baal had trotted over to gloat just like he had before. As though it was their execution and not his own they were gathered there to celebrate. She looked into his smirking face and Mitchell's surprised, "Carter!" came an instant too late.

Jack looked down at Baal lying half stunned where her blow had put him and under his breath said, "Nice." He didn't know the half of it.

The Tok'ra pulled Baal up from the ground and dragged him to the extraction chamber. Without a word of explanation, she followed them over and double-checked the restraints behind them. They frowned at her but kept their own counsel. Doubtlessly everyone there with the possible exception of Vala would have loved to be the one who'd thrown that punch.

When she made her way back over to stand beside him, Jack leaned slightly towards her and said, "Down, girl." When she let that pass without an explanation or an apology, he said, "Something I should know about, Colonel?"

"Later, Sir," she'd answered him. "I want to watch this." They'd both focused their attention back to the ceremony then. When the Tok'ra dashed Baal to the ground, it was almost more than she could do to not stomp his slimy head with the heel of her boot and grind it into the dirt.

"That's it?" Mitchell asked when it was all over, and she fervently hoped so.

"Lunch?" Jack asked everyone hopefully. Once he mentioned he was paying the guys all agreed. Vala bowed out to hang with the Tok'ra and see how things went for Baal's last victim, and she didn't say anything.

The guys might all make it to Mallory's to make a dent in his expense account, but she'd be tied up in debriefings for the duration. Sooner or later, Walter would send her in a stale, dry sandwich but that was the most she could hope for. Not that she was complaining.

Walking beside him, laughing at one of his dumb wisecracks, she thought she would never complain again.

*Lest anyone wonder, I am not insinuating a romantic love here. Certainly the love between two friends can be as strong and as binding as any: Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. John 15:13


	12. Epilogue

The debriefing had been long and involved, and he didn't know about her but he was really ready to blow this place and go home. What passed for home when he made it back to the Springs anyway. He'd sat in the tape room and heard enough of her story to know the night he'd anticipated when he'd set off for the extraction ceremony was not going to happen. But then they were used to their plans not happening...the problem he thought frowning at her image on the screen was she'd taken a detour through time sometime that morning while he'd hung around waiting for her to show up.

He might have checked out for a few hundred years' worth of atrocities sometime in all that crooning, but she'd spent two and a half years away from his side. She was not going to slip easily and effortlessly back into place. He could read that in her eyes even from the wrong side of the camera.

He eventually exercised his authority, pulled her out of their clutches, and took her home. She was a strange mixture of excited delight and pensive broodiness. She'd waited a long time to be here again, and he didn't doubt she was happy to be back. But she'd invested her life (willingly or not) in another world, and he wasn't so obtuse that he didn't know it had cost her something to turn her back on it and walk away.

"So...tell me about him."

"Him?"

"Come on, Carter," he said gently. "Two and a half years is a long time. You think I expect you to have grieved over my dead body that whole time? You're young, full of life...I don't blame you a bit. You, however, can't help blaming yourself, and that creates a problem for me.

"See I'm supposed to be back in D.C. bright and early Thursday morning and who knows when we'll have time together after that? I really don't want to waste these next few days with you lurking around feeling guilty or feeling like you have to paste a smile on your face and act like everything is okay while you're missing someone else. Let's just put it out on the table and deal with it."

"I'm not sure that's a good idea, Sir."

"I am. And if you're going to let those nasty 'Sir's keep slipping in, consider it an order. I know there's more to what happened than what's going into the official file. I want to hear-well, no, I don't want to hear it, but you need me to. So shoot. Who was he, Carter?'

She refused to look at him when she answered, "Jon. Jon O'Neill."

"Me!" he said in surprise and then nodded his head in evident satisfaction. "I knew it! I knew it, I am irresistible in any timeline!" he gloated to try to lighten the shadowed look behind her eyes. And maybe if he'd had time to think about it, he would have known it. It certainly wasn't unprecedented from other alternate timelines/realities they'd visited. Destiny did seem to have something in mind for them.

She gave him a small, rather feeble smile and said, "You realize that you are the most conceited man I have met in two universes?'

"I take offense at that because I'm sure I heard McKay's name mentioned in your debriefing, and I've got nothing on that man as far as sheer arrogance and conceit are concerned."

"I stand corrected."

"Apology accepted. Now tell me about the other me...and you." And slowly with some trepidation and tears she did.

"Jamie Ahmsted," he mused when she'd finished. "I remember her. I wouldn't say I came close to marrying her, but she was a nice girl."

He wouldn't say it not because it wasn't true but because he'd learned two things from Carter as she talked. For one reason or another it was essential to her for conscience sake that he and this Jon were not the same man. He would have a harder time dealing with her having been married to some other guy...especially considering she'd celebrated a year of marriage with that guy and their first anniversary was only now coming up.

Him, he took it as a good thing she'd fallen for the other him...had to mean even with all of his faults and the difficulties of their long distance relationship she was happy enough as his wife to be willing to take up with him all over again.

She obviously saw it differently-some overthought woman thing he supposed. Probably afraid he'd one day ask her which of the two she'd loved the most. She'd been the Carter to come home, but if he'd understood what she was saying that hadn't been decided because she was the one who loved him more while the other Carter had been the one to love Jon more. Nothing that simple.

But, he would never ask, never even wonder. She'd answered the only thing that mattered to him when she hadn't abandoned him and this world to time. She'd bided her time and endured whatever she'd endured in that other time and world to come back for him and that said it all.

If it helped her sleep at night believing he wasn't the same man in both realities, he wouldn't disillusion her. But for all she wanted to believe otherwise, listening to her talk he'd learned he and the other him weren't all that different. They'd chosen to live their lives differently and they'd been influenced and shaped by the consequences of their choices to some degree, but they were essentially the same man. Loving one of them, she'd been helpless not to love the other.

 _"Jon! What a surprise," she'd said smiling up at him and resting a hand on her obviously pregnant belly._

 _"Jamie, you're looking...great," he told her with a grin. He was not as surprised to see her as she was to see him. He'd made the mistake of visiting his granddad on the week of the all school reunion and had consequently been running into old acquaintances left and right._

 _She socked him playfully and then twirled so he could get a good look at her. "I'm looking wonderful if you're into swollen bellies and feet," she told him with a laugh._

 _"I'm surprised you're here...I figured you'd be-" he began but then cut himself off because life had a nasty habit of not working out the way you planned, and he was the last person with any right to rub her nose in it if her plans had fallen short of her dreams._

 _"Out in the boat?" she finished for him without any reluctance or regret. "Well," she patted her bulging stomach, "Gary said he wasn't up for an unassisted birth this summer, so he grounded us for the duration."_

 _"Gary? Gary Dolan? You married Gary Dolan...the guy can't-!"_

 _"...even fish!" she finished for him again. "I know. I know. But there are worse things in life. He does make beautiful babies...and buko bucks to keep the boat afloat. We do all right. How about you? Get much fishing in?"_

 _"Not enough to mention."_

 _"That's a shame, Jon. Or colonel now I hear. Next thing we know, it will be general. I warned you you were throwing your life away when you threw me over for the Air Force."_

 _"That you did."_

 _"No regrets though?"_

 _"I miss the kids," he said after a moment of deliberation. "I miss that passel of kids you promised me if I hung around...and the fishing, of course." They'd laughed together easily as they always had, and she'd waddled off to find her husband, and he'd hurried off to avoid meeting anyone else he used to know._

And he'd wondered then as he sometimes had through the years what his life would have been like if he had made a different decision as a seventeen year old kid. If he had had any hopes of being able to support the two of them and whatever kids came along, he would have stayed, married her, and made a go of trying to make her dreams come true.

Instead, he'd been a kid with no skills, no rich uncle, no nothing but a chance at an ROTC scholarship and a mom who struggled to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads because she'd married a kid who hadn't been able to take the pressures of providing for a family and had left her to handle them alone. At seventeen, he'd been too scared to marry Jamie and discover some time down the road that he had grown up to be his father.

But, if the vagaries of time had left him an uncle with a good job at the mill...well, he and Jon would have been close enough to indistinguishable.

Those contrasts Carter was clinging so tightly to, he doubted they would have existed at all. But if they gave her some measure of comfort, he was happy to leave them to her.

And she need not ever worry that he'd ask her to pick favorites between the two of them. Their life choices had molded them into somewhat different men, but her own choices mirrored his. She'd enjoyed her visit to that other world (and it was going to take her sometime to get over feeling guilty for that for reasons he quite probably would never understand) but she belonged in his.

"I've always favored long-legged blonds myself," he told her, and he was content with the small smile he got in return. She'd left people she loved behind and she'd need some time to deal with that loss. A good deal of time.

Patience wasn't his long suit, but he loved her enough to be willing to give her all the time she needed. Thanks to her and Daniel, they had, after all, all the time in the world. He drew her into a closer embrace and rested his head against hers, breathing in her smell and enjoying the feel of her in his arms.

"You really don't have problems with any of this?" she asked him.

"Well...I have to admit it's a bit on the odd side," he said wondering if this would be a good time to confess the stolen kiss that had been the high point of that whole time loop fiasco. He'd always wondered how she'd react to knowing he'd taken advantage of her and the situation. But, he decided now wasn't the time to find out. That had been child's play compared to this and bringing it up would do nothing but belittle her feelings.

Instead, he said, "Tell me something...did he make you happy?" She grimaced in guilty dismay and he asked again, "Did he?"

"Yes, as much as I could be under the circumstances." Under the circumstances. As happy as she could be believing he was dead and she was guilty of what? Just what exactly was she afraid she'd done in loving his counterpart?

"That's all I could ask," he told her. "I'd hate to think you weren't happy for all that time. In fact, I'd have a lot more problems with all of this if I thought you'd been ready to curl up and die just because you lost me. I may be irresistible but I'm hardly irreplaceable."

She shook her head against him and said in a whisper, "You are to me."


End file.
